Brian Loader

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Brian D. Loader (born 1958) is currently Co-Director of the Centre for Political Youth Culture and Communication (CPAC) at the University of York, UK. Brian joined the Department of Sociology at York in January 2006 to pursue his scholarly interests into digital media communication and democratic governance. His overarching interest is in new media communications technologies, and the social, political and economic factors shaping their development and diffusion, and their implications for social, economic, political and cultural change. He has published widely in these areas and is the founding Editor of the international journal Information, Communication and Society whose aim and scope is to critically explore these issues in depth.

Brian's interest in the transforming capacities of Internet began in the mid-1990s primarily as a critical response to two discourses that continue to frame discussions about the socio-political influence of new media technologies to this day. The first, addressed in his book ''The Governance of Cyberspace'' (1997), highlighted and criticised the ‘cyber-libertarian’ portrayals of the Internet as emancipatory spaces divorced from the ‘real world’ of power, place, history and political economy. The second, and related concern, outlined in ''The Cyberspace Divide'' (1998) was the crucial issue of what impact the Internet would have upon different social groups. These two themes have continued to shape his research interest in how social relations of power are increasingly mediated through information and communication technologies. Provided by Wikipedia