Thomas Streeter

Thomas Streeter (https://streeter.fims.uwo.ca/) teaches at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. He studies media, technology, law, and culture. He studies 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.

His award-winning Selling the Air, a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the US broadcast industry, 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. The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet, came out in December, 2010.