Steven John Thompson

PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University. I taught at Johns Hopkins University, Dartmouth College, and Clemson, among others. I'm a media veteran, analyst, consultant, scholar and speaker on Internet phenomena and new media ethics. Engineering background informs my STEM-STEAM research, writing, and presentation projects and curricula. I teach online communication studies courses, also, for the past decade and have taught online courses at four universities..

I am Editor for the forthcoming reference book, Handbook of Research on Machine Ethics and Morality. I was Editor of the 2014 reference book, Global Issues and Ethical Considerations in Human Enhancement Technologies, and am Editor for Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society, published in 2018. I'm on the Editorial Board of Academic Editors for PeerJ journal in Emerging Technologies, Ethical Issues, Human-Computer Interaction, Science Policy, and related subject areas. I am on the Membership Committee for GigaNet.

I published pioneering quantitative research on Internet addiction in 1996, and presented my icon[et]ics theory on agency of terrorism images as virtual subscripts of artificial intelligence at University of Basel in 2009. I was the closing academic plenary panel discussant at UNESCO’s First International Forum on Media and Information Literacy in Fez, Morocco in 2011. My research has been presented in over a dozen countries across four continents. I enjoy giving presentations on the future of Internet phenomena and new media.