Alistair Duff is reader in information & journalism. Based in the School of Arts & Creative Industries, his research contributes also to the Centre for Social Informatics, the University's top research group according to RAE 2001 and RAE 2008.

Dr Duff is principal investigator on an AHRC-funded project, Informing the Good Society (InGSoc): New Directions in Information Policy. (www.informingthegoodsociety.com)

Duff is intereseted in all topics relating to information society studies, including: social informatics; information policy; technocracy; digital divides; politics of information; teledemocracy; media ownership; FOI; privacy & surveillance; copyright; political punditry and 'e'punditry; population census; information & media ethics; sociology of knowledge/information; cyberspace; specific thinkers, e.g. Bell, Lippmann, Habermas, Rawls, Williams, Ellul, Tawney, Castells, etc.

He has been External Examiner at City University, for the MSc Information, Communication & Society, 2009-2012, and for the BA Journalism at the Lincoln School of Journalism, 2007-2011.

He was a 2006/7 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Prior to that, Duff was a Visiting Lecturer, Global Information Society Studies media summer school, University of Zurich.

He was a Napier Teaching Fellow from 2003-2008.

PUBLICATIONS include:

Pundit for post-industrial times? Walter Lippmann as an information society theorist, Information, Communication & Society 16(6) 2013, in press

A Normative Theory of the Information Society (Routledge Research Monographs, 2012)

The Rawls-Tawney theorem and the digital divide in post-industrial society, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 62(3) 2011, 604-612

The age of access? Information policy and social progress, in R. Negrine, ed., Communications Policy: Theories and Issues (Palgrave, 2010), pp. 49-64

Daniel Bell's theory of the information society, in B. Smart, ed., Post-Industrial Society Vol III (Sage, 2010), pp. 201-232

The information society, Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication (Sage, 2010), pp. 397-400

Rethinking the digital divide: from philanthropy to isonomia, in Proceedings of the International Conference New Media and Information: Convergences and Divergences, Panteion University, Athens, 2009 (ISBN 978-960-6746-05-5)

The European information society: scholarly and official perspectives, Journal of the Japan Society of Information and Communication Research 26 (3) 2008, pp. 29-31

Information liberation? The relations of freedom and knowledge in social-democratic thought, in Nico Stehr (ed.) Knowledge and Democracy: a 21st Century Perspective  (Transaction Publishers, 2008), pp. 199-215.

Documentation and utopia: Fabian anticipations of the information society, in B. Rayward, ed. European Modernism and the Information Society (Ashgate, 2008), pp. 185-199

Powers in the land? British political columnists in the information era, Journalism Practice 2 (2) 2008, pp. 231-245. 

The normative crisis of the information society, Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 2 (1) 2008, article 3 

R. H. Tawney, Macmillan International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008), pp. 271-272

Neo-Rawlsian co-ordinates: notes on a theory of justice for the information age, International Review of Information Ethics 6 (12/2006), pp. 17-22 

Social engineering in the information age, The Information Society 21 (1) 2005, pp. 1-5

The sickness of an information society: R.H. Tawney and the post-industrial condition, Information, Communication and Society 7 (3) 2004, pp. 433-452

The past, present, and future of information policy: towards a normative theory of the information society, Information, Communication and Society 7 (1) 2004, 69-87

On the present state of information society studies, Education for Information 19 (3) 2001, pp. 231-244

Information Society Studies. London: Routledge, 2000