At UC Santa Barbara, Bimber has been affiliated with the Department of Political Science, and the Center for Information Technology and Society (which he founded in 1999), and has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Communication. He is also involved with the Center for Responsible Machine Learning. Bimber’s research examines how digital media affect democratic politics, with a particular focus on the problems associated with social media, such as selective exposure, polarization, populism, and disinformation.
Bimber's book "Information and American Democracy" (2003, Cambridge University Press) explored how radical changes in technological mediums create opportunities for innovation, highlighting the concept of post-bureaucratic organizations. In this book and earlier work going back to the late 1990s, Bimber argued that optimists, including those in Silicon Valley, who believed the Internet would boost political participation among citizens were wrong. Instead, he argued, the Internet was facilitating people finding and creating political groups for advocacy and protest. This acceleration of collective action among engaged citizens was the signature effect of the early Internet. Years later, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the surge in right-wing political organizations of the 2010s illustrated this effect. In a 2012 interview, political scientist David Karpf of George Washington University later referenced Bimber's work, noting that a new generation of organizations like MoveOn.org and Daily Kos exemplified Bimber's theories by utilizing email, blogs, Twitter, and other social media in ways that older activist groups did not. Karpf termed this phenomenon the "MoveOn" effect, underscoring a generational shift in how membership and fundraising are approached in the digital age.[1]
Bimber has long argued that the impact of the Internet on political behavior is complex.[9][10] In 2000, he said the Internet should not be viewed as a single entity with a uniform effect, that is either good or bad, and more research was needed to understand its impact fully.[3] He characterized the internet then as a "virtual Wild West," highlighting the lack of regulatory principles and governing bodies comparable to other major global industries. Bimber has noted how in the last decade the increasing harm associated with the internet has become clear, highlighting the need for meaningful and serious public policy changes, and calling for a re-evaluation of societal approaches and corporate responsibility, especially in light of rapid AI advancements. He has argued that unless AI regulations are established soon, the new industry will quickly achieve the same political status as the Internet industry, in which powerful firms defend the unregulated free-market status quo in order to protect huge streams of revenue.[11][12]
In his early work, Bimber also explored technological determinism in relation to Karl Marx’s views, highlighting Marx's focus on human self-expression and resistance to alienation rather than purely technological determinism. He argues that Marx was more economically deterministic, challenging the notion that Marx was a pure determinist in technological terms. Bimber categorized historic approaches to technological determinism in three groups:
Norm Based Accounts
Unintended Consequences Accounts
Logical Sequence Accounts.
According to Bimber, Marx’s views aligned more with the socially constructed Norm Based and Unintended Consequences Accounts, rather than the fixed Logical Sequence Accounts.[13]
Bimber's current projects current projects focus on conspiracy theories and other falsehoods in the US and Europe. He uses survey techniques and Large Language Models (LLMs) to study democratically corrosive content in the public sphere. Bimber's recent research shows that different social media platforms have variable implications for the spread of conspiracy theories and other falsehoods. The stronger underlying social ties in Facebook and related social media make extremist content more impactful on individuals than is the case for X/Twitter and related social media in which social ties among users are weaker or non-existent. His work emphasizes the difference between being exposed to democratically corrosive content in social media and being affected by it.[14]
Bimber, B. (2003). Information and American democracy: Technology in the evolution of political power. Cambridge University Press.[1]
Bimber, B. A. (1996). The politics of expertise in Congress: The rise and fall of the Office of Technology Assessment. SUNY Press. ISBN9780791430590
Bimber, B., Flanagin, A., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective action in organizations: Interaction and engagement in an era of technological change. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521191722
Bimber, B., & Davis, R. (2003). Campaigning online: The Internet in US elections. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780198034575
Selected recent journal articles
Bimber, B., Labarre, J., Gomez, D., Nikiforov, I., & Koc-Michalska, K. (2024). Media use, feelings of being devalued, and democratically corrosive sentiment in the US. International Journal of Press/Politics. doi:10.1177/19401612241253455
Gelovani, S., Theocharis, Y., Koc-Michalska, K., & Bimber, B. (2024). Intergroup ethnocentrism and social media: Evidence from three western democracies. Information, Communication & Society. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2024.2375259
Theocharis, Y., Boulianne, S., Koc-Michalska, K., & Bimber, B. (2023). Platform affordances and political participation: How social media reshape political engagement. West European Politics, 46(4), 788-811. doi:10.1080/01402382.2022.2087410
Mei, A., Kabir, A., Levy, S., Subbiah, M., Allaway, E., Judge, J., Patton, D., Bimber, B., McKeown, K., & Yang, W. (2022). Mitigating covertly unsafe text within natural language systems. Findings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. arXiv:2210.09306
Bimber, B. & Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2022). Social influence and political participation around the world. European Journal of Political Science, 14(2), 135-154. doi:10.1017/S175577392200008X
References
^ abcWihbey, John (2012-07-02). "Research chat: David Karpf, scholar of Internet organizing and activism". The Journalist's Resource. Retrieved 2024-08-06. David Karpf: Probably the biggest one is what I would call the "disruption thesis." A lot of what I'm discussing in my book when I'm looking at MoveOn.org or Daily Kos — all of this new generation of organizations — is very similar to what Bruce Bimber found in his 2003 book Information and American Democracy. Bruce was saying that when you radically change the technological medium, that creates opportunity for innovation. He talked about post-bureaucratic organizations. So I'm coming along nine years later and looking at what those organizations have turned out to be. It's very much in line with what he was then suggesting. But what really wasn't clear when he was researching for that book was that there's a generation gap among organizations. It's not the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Clubs and the ACLU that are leading in terms of innovation. There's a real difference in how a MoveOn.org or a Daily Kos uses email, blogs, Twitter and all of these social media, compared to how the older activist groups do. This is what I call the "MoveOn" effect — this isn't about the effectiveness of MoveOn, per se — it's about changes in how we define members and how we raise money from members.
^Livingston, Steven (2013). "Remerciements". La Révolution de l'Information en Afrique: 58–59.
^ ab"THE NET EFFECT Series: LIFE ONLINE: [SOUTH". www.proquest.com. Retrieved 2024-08-05. Bruce Bimber, director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, falls somewhere in the middle. He thinks the population using the Internet is too diverse to accurately measure. No two people start using the Net at the same time, and as with TV viewing, their habits can vary greatly.
^"The minuscule risks we ignore - ProQuest". www.proquest.com. ProQuest356680344. Retrieved 2024-08-05. Another concerned expert is engineer and social scientist Bruce Bimber of the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We have to pay attention to nanotechnology before it hits us on the head," says Bimber, who founded the UCSB Center for Nanotechnology and Society to do just that.
^"SCIENCE WATCH; Taking a Broader Look at - ProQuest". www.proquest.com. ProQuest421515941. Retrieved 2024-08-05. Bimber is a former electrical engineer with roots in Silicon Valley who decided in the early '80s that he wanted to study what the computer revolution means for society, rather than contribute to the technology itself.
^"Persuasion Too? - ProQuest". www.proquest.com. ProQuest215698857. Retrieved 2024-08-12. An important new study by two political scientists, Bruce Bimber of University of California at Santa Barbara and Richard Davis of Brigham Young, confirms what has been an established principle among political consultants since I started tracking online campaigning in 1998; the Internet is a great medium for communicating with your base, but not so great for attracting the attention of swing voters and converting them to your side.
^"Technology and democracy in crisis: time to 'get uncomfortable and get curious'". The Current. 2023-10-11. Retrieved 2024-08-06. Closing the conference, Bruce Bimber, a UCSB political scientist who has been studying the internet for three decades, described the online universe as a virtual Wild West that lacks the regulatory principles and governing bodies common to other megalithic global industries, such as agriculture, aviation and pharmaceuticals, among many others.
^Falcone, Daniel (2022-05-06). "Karl Marx: Student and Teacher of Technology". CounterPunch.org. Retrieved 2024-08-06. Bruce Bimber further explains technological determinism as it applies to Marx's specific views on technology and culture. He is interested in the varied approaches in looking at technological determinism (TD) and explains Marx's outlook of human self-expression and resistance to alienation while arguing that Marx was more economically deterministic than he was technologically. TD states that a society's technology defines the growth of its social construct, overall culture, and societal beliefs and values. The phrase in this context, is often used in academia by sociologists and economists. Bimber doubts that Marx was himself purely determinist and sets out to explain technological determinism's three faces. All three faces are considered technologically deterministic, but Bimber cites how comparing them allows for a clearer understanding if Marx was a proponent of TD or not.
^"Democracy is more fragile than you think". University of California. 2024-02-01. Retrieved 2024-08-06. "Democracy is hard," says Bruce Bimber, distinguished professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara. "Accepting that people you disagree with are as legitimate as you are places high demands — in some ways, unrealistic demands — on an individual.
