Brian Loader

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.

In 1996 he was responsible for establishing and directing the Community Informatics Research and Applications Unit (CIRA) which attempted to explore the potential of new media for shaping the development, sustainability and even regeneration of community relations. What he described as community informatics was from the outset concerned with the relationship between geographical places where people lived, worked and socialized and the networked spaces provided by the Internet. Publications such as Community Informatics: Shaping Computer-Mediated Social Networks (2001) and Challenging the Digital Divide? A literature Review of Community Informatics Initiatives (2004) documented both the potential of new media for community development and also the wider role it played in the fragmentation and individualization of local social relations. Active research projects, including Trimdon Digital Village informed UK policy debates about bridging the digital divide. Brian continues to be a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Community Informatics.

During his time at CIRA Brian together with colleagues at Teesside and worldwide attempted to explore the potential of new media for shaping the development, sustainability and even regeneration of community relations. What they described as community informatics was from the outset concerned with the relationship between geographical places where people lived, worked and socialized and the networked spaces provided by the Internet.

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