Tim Jordan is Professor of Digital Cultures and Head of School of Media, Film and Music. His current project is working on new economic practices in digital contexts, for which he will be examining a range of case studies, including Google/Baidu and search, Facebook and social media, Uber/AirBnB and regulatory disintermediation, free and open source software production, and the maker movement among others.
Jordan has been involved in analysis of the social and cultural meaning of the internet and cyberspace since the mid-1990s. His most recent book is Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society, which is about the politics of information. He has also been working with colleagues on the idea of ‘being in the zone’ among surfers and computer programmers which should appear as a collected edition Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity: Being in the Zone that he co-edited with Professor Kath Woodward and Dr Brigid McClure.
Prior to this, Jordan’s research has been about communication and the internet, published in Internet, Society, Culture: Communicative Practices Before and After the Internet (Bloomsbury 2013) in which he compares letters from 1832-1857 to Australia with communication in online games. He has also had a longstanding interest in hacking and hacktivism and has previously published: Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism (Polity 2008), Cyberpower (Routledge 1999) and, with Paul Taylor, Hacktivism and Cyberwars (Routledge 2004).
He also played a role in analyzing social movements and popular protest with publications including Activism!: Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future of Society (Reaktion 2002), as co-editor of Storming the Millennium (Lawrence and Wishart1999, with Adam Lent) and he was a founding editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Social Movement Studies.
In addition to his books on social movements and internet cultures, Jordan has published on Pokemon, surfing, and technology and cultural theory. He began at the University of Sussex in 2014. Prior to this he worked at King’s College London for three years and at Sociology at the Open University for eleven years, contributing there widely to teaching and co-editing the books Security: Sociology and the Making of Social Worlds (Manchester University Press 2008, with Simon Carter and Sophie Watson) and Social Change (Blackwell 2002, with Steve Pile).
He has been Head of the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and of the Department of Sociology at the Open University.