Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford. He focuses on the ways that emerging media have shaped American life since World War II. He is the author of a number of books, including most recently Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, with photographer Mary Beth Meehan.
SHC Project
Crisis of Representation: Media and the Politics of Difference in 1980s America
Between the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the rise of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, Americans witnessed a now-forgotten explosion in new media technologies (think cable TV, the Walkman, the VCR) and a simultaneous turn toward identity-centered politics on both the left and the right. Turner will be working on a book that explores how these events shaped one another and that argues that when they did, they helped set the stage for the polarized, hyper-individuated world we inhabit today.