Bruce Bimber

Bruce Bimber FAAAS, FICA
Bimber in 2024.
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Professor, political scientist, communication scholar
Academic background
Education	Ph.D. in Political Science (1992); BS Electrical Engineering (1983)
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University
Academic work
Discipline	Political science
Sub-discipline	Political Communication, digital media, collective action
Institutions	University of California, Santa Barbara
Main interests	Political communication, social media, political behavior, collective action, technological determinism
Notable works	Information and American Democracy (2003)
Influenced	David Karpf,[1] Steven Livingston[2]
Website	www.brucebimber.net

Bruce A. Bimber FAAAS, FICA is an American social scientist, author, and academic. Bimber is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is known for his work in political communication, particularly the relationship between digital media and human behavior in political organization and collective action. Bimber was the founding director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB,^[3] and the founder of the Center for Nanotechnology and Society,^[4][5] has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2011,^[6] and is a Fellow of the International Communication Association.^[7] He is also a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

As an undergraduate, Bimber studied electrical engineering and graduated from Stanford University. Then, he worked in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Bimber later studied political science and got his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Before joining the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in the mid-1990s, he spent a couple of years at the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C., where he worked on education policy and technology policy.^[8]

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:

1. Norm Based Accounts
2. Unintended Consequences Accounts
3. 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]

In 2011, Bimber was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[6] He is also a fellow of the International Communication Association. He is also a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

• 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. ISBN 9780791430590

• Bimber, B., Flanagin, A., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective action in organizations: Interaction and engagement in an era of technological change. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521191722
• Bimber, B., & Davis, R. (2003). Campaigning online: The Internet in US elections. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198034575

• 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
• Gomez, D., Gueirrez Garcia-Pardo, I., Labarre, J., & Bimber, B. (2024). Beyond Large Language Models: Rediscovering the role of classical statistics in modern data science. Proceedings of the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence.
• 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

• Bimber's Web Site