Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Fred Turner
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Writing on Public Books
On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to reimagine left politics from top to bottom.
“The Culture of Narcissism” @40—and Counting
What if today’s self-centered world was born decades before digital media, as part of a much longer transformation of American society?
The Big Picture: Trump on Twitter
On its face, Twitter appears to be a quintessentially democratic medium. It promotes individualized expression, helps build social networks, and, until recently, seemed to epitomize the decentralized public sphere long called for by liberal theorists and digital utopians alike. During Donald Trump’s campaign for president, however, it became an engine of authoritarianism. Day after day, […]
On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
The Democratic Surround: A Conversation Between Fred Turner and Clay Shirky
Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, to talk about Turner’s new book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. A prequel to the influential From Counterculture to Cyberculture which […]
Margaret Mead’s Countercultures
If you were raised in the United States during the 1960s, as I was, and if you came of intellectual age in the 1980s, as I did, chances are that you too have inherited a strangely black-and-white history of mid-20th-century American culture. The story goes something like this: In the wake of World War II, […]
