Our research examines many aspects of the social and cultural transitions underway at present around the globe, but we have a particular focus on technological change and three topics: Social Collaboration and Dynamic Communities; Global Cultures in Transition; and Technology in Education. We are currently working on expanding our research initiative portfolio to include additional research initiatives on Social Computing and Trust, Reliability, and Information Security Online.

Social Collaboration and Dynamic Communities

Social Collaboration and Dynamic Communities

The structure of communities and the myriad patterns of human engagement that comprise societies have always been tied fundamentally to technology. What we have long recognized as modern society (or “post-modern” in many interpretations) is inextricably connected to the technologies of the industrial revolution and their immediate successors.

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Bruce Bimber

Bruce Bimber, Director Emeritus

Bruce Bimber is Professor in the departments of Political Science and Communication at UC Santa Barbara, and Director Emeritus of the Center for Information Technology and Society.

Featured Publication

Cease and Desist: Repression, Strategic Voting and the 2000 Presidential Election

This article examines how state officials acted to impede strategic voting in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election.

Global Cultures in Transition

Global Cultures in Transition

Global Cultures in Transition is a research initiative affiliated with the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB. Rather than assume that the globalization of information technologies “flattens” or equalizes socio-economic relations around the world, researchers in this initiative explore the differences and disparities across various societies and cultures.

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Lisa Parks

Lisa Parks, Faculty Steering Committee Member

Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she is also an affiliate of the Departments of Art and Women’s Studies and serves on the Executive Committee on the College of Creative Studies.

Featured Publication

Technology in Education

Technology in Education

Technology has long played a role in education. However, contrary to expectations, the adoption of technology in almost all areas of education has been surprisingly slow.

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Richard Mayer

Richard Mayer, Faculty Steering Committee Member

Richard E. Mayer is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where he has served since 1975.

Featured Publication

Technology Comes to College

Understanding the Cognitive Consequences of Infusing Technology in College Classrooms

Publications

Leading Tasks in a Leaderless Movement: The Case of Strategic Voting

This article examines social movement leadership and how organizing tasks may be completed in online social movements.

Reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment

Collective action theory, which is widely applied to explain human phenomena in which public goods are at stake, traditionally rests on at least two main tenets: that individuals confront discrete decisions about free riding and that formal organization is central to locating and contacting potential participants in collective action, motivating them, and coordinating their actions.

Pockets Full of Memories: an interactive museum installation

Conceived as an installation on the topic of the archive and memory, Pockets Full of Memories was exhibited on the main floor of the Centre Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art, Paris from 10 April to 3 September 2001. During this time, approximately 20,000 visitors came to view the installation and contributed over 3300 objects in their possession, digitally scanning and describing them.

An Analytical Framework for Pricing of Services on the Internet

There exists a huge demand for multimedia goods and services on the Internet. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to price such services in the Internet. As a first step, we consider a system where a server handles requests for a service on a First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) basis. We develop a model where customers can refuse the service based on their capacity to pay and their willingness to do so. We show that charging a flat price maximizes the expectation of revenue and derive the optimal price for the analytical framework we develop.

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