About the Author

Philip N. Howard (BA Toronto, MSc London School of Economics, PhD Northwestern) is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at the University of Washington. His book New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) is about the role of information technology in campaign strategy and political culture. He has published several articles and book chapters on the use of new media and polling technologies in politics, and co-edited Society Online: The Internet In Context (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003) and the Handbook of Internet Politics (London, UK: Routledge, 2009).

He has been a Politics Research Fellow at the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington DC, the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research in London, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, CA. He served on the advisory board of the Survey2000 and Survey2001 Projects, and as co-PI on the large project called Information and Communication Technologies in Central Asia. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts. He has worked as a consultant to the World Resources Institute, the Canadian International Development Agency, and development assistance projects for Haiti and Mexico.

Currently, he directs the World Information Access Project, a multi-year investigation of patterns of inequality in information access around the world, funded by the National Science Foundation and Intel's People and Practices Group.