Fred Turner

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. A cultural historian and media scholar, he has long been interested in how the consensus of one era gives way to the orthodoxies of another. How do individuals and communities make sense of these shifts? And what roles do media play in this process?

He focuses primarily on the ways that emerging media have shaped American life since World War II. His books include From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and its prequel, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, as well as Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory, and with photographer Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America. His work has been translated into six languages and received a number of awards.

Before earning his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, in 2002, Turner worked as a freelance journalist for ten years. He continues to write for newspapers and magazines in the United States and Europe.