Thomas Streeter

[Full_Vita.pdf]


Thomas Streeter has been a faculty 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.
 
His award-winning 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 has presented at conferences in Europe, Australia, and the U.S., and has published articles and chapters in outlets ranging from the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal to the Journal of Communication to Critical Inquiry.
 
He is also completing a book tentatively called The Net Effect: reflections on the cultural politics of internet structure.
 
Some Publications

 
Some Conference Activities
 
  • "Revisiting Selling the Air," a paper presented to the panel "Milestones in Communications Policy Research Revisited" at the International Communication Association meeting in New York City, May 2005.
  • "U.S. Policy Discourse and Modes of Morality," a paper presented to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, London, UK, March 31- April 3, 2005.
  • "Cultural studies and copyright: on the politics of 'the ownership society'," a paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in November, 2004, in Atlanta, Georgia.
  • Response to Susan Whiting, CEO of Nielsen Media Research, at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Communications Forum event titled "What's  Happening to Prime Time?," April 17th, 2003. (Audio online at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/nielsen.html.)
  • "Does Capitalism need Irrational Exuberance?: Business Culture and the Internet in the 1990s," a paper delivered on June 14, 2002, to the conference on "Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty First Century" in Honor of Nicholas Garnham at the University of Westminster, Harrow Campus, London, UK.
  • "Copyright and Convergence: How Intellectual Property is Replacing Channels as the Underpinning of Market Power in Electronic Media," a paper delivered to the Annual Convention of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies on March 6, 2003, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
  • "The Net Effect: the Internet and the New White Collar Style," a paper delivered to the workshop on Information Technology and Society at the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study, June 8-10, 2001 (http://www.sss.ias.edu/publications/papers/paper14.pdf).
  • "Open Software, Intellectual Property, and the Politics of Creativity," invited paper presented on the symposium, "Infiltrating Digital Systems," at the Annenberg Center of the University of Southern California, Oct. 22, 1999.
  • "Media, Intellectual Property, and Culture in the U.S.: Towards a Politics of Creativity," paper delivered to the conference on "The Humanities, Arts and Public Culture in Two Hemispheres," July 5-7, 1999, Brisbane, Australia.
  • "What's in a Name?: The culture of business, the business of culture, and the politics of internet commercialization," paper delivered to the American Studies Association annual meeting, Nov. 22, 1998, Seattle, Washington.
  • "Culture, Media, and Law," workshop coordinated for the conference: New Approaches to International Law, May 9-10, 1997, at Harvard Law School.