FIMS Profile

Tom Streeter
Chair, MMJC Program
Professor

FIMS & Nursing Building Room 4091
Phone: 519-661-2111 x84347

University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7
Fax: 519-661-3506
tstreet2@uwo.ca
  • About Me

  • Research

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  • Courses Taught

I study media, technology, law, and culture. You might say that I study the soft side of hard issues, that is, the role of cultural beliefs in shaping things like institutions, property, legal regulation, and technology. From radio broadcasting to the internet, the adoption, use, and even the constitution of new technological systems are often influenced, not just by economic and structural factors, but by cultural trends and habits of belief. And because of that, I believe, they can be changed.

For a quick taste of my work, here are a few short pieces available online: 

More of my writing can be found here

My Vitamy Homepage

Thomas Streeter joined the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in January of 2019. Before that he had been a member of the Sociology Department of the University of Vermont since 1989. He has an undergraduate degree in Semiotics from Brown University and a PhD in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also taught for the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, and for the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science, Princeton, NJ, in 2000-2001. He has been a UVM University Scholar for 2014-15, a Faculty Associate with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (2015-16), and a Faculty Resource Network Scholar in Residence, New York University (Fall 2015). He received the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy, at the International Communications Association in 2017. 

The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (NYU Press, 2011) is a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology. Selling the Air, a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the US broadcast industry and its regulatory apparatus, was published in 1996. He edited, with Zephyr Teachout, a volume about the use of the internet in Howard Dean's run for President, called Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope, published in 2007. He is currently working on a project about the effects of the shift from printed to digital documentation in routine legal practices from 1980 to the present.
 
My Vita
My Homepage

I am interested in working with intellectually committed graduate students in critical media industry studies, media law and policy, media and politics, and materialist approaches to culture.   

FIMS 9330 Special Topic: Culture, Technology, Information 2022 Winter , 2021 Winter , 2020 Winter , 2019 Winter FIMS 9336 Information and Media Policy for Social Justice 2023 Winter MIT 2500 The Meaning of Technology: Exploring the Relationship Between Technology & Society 2024 Winter , 2023 Winter , 2022 Fall , 2022 Winter , 2021 Winter , 2020 Winter MIT 3441 Special Topics in MIT: Media and Information Technology Policy 2020 Fall , 2019 Fall MIT 3500 Media and Information Technology Policy 2023 Fall , 2021 Fall MS 9100 Interdisciplinary Foundations of Media Theory 2023 Fall , 2022 Fall , 2021 Fall , 2020 Fall