User:Benlight

I am Professor of Technology and Society, in the University of Salford’s school of Media, Music and Performance, Director of the Information Systems, Organisations and Society Research Centre and a member of the University’s Digital Cluster Executive. You can also find versions of me on Facebook and Gaydar - you’ll need to look hard to find the latter! I joined the University of Salford in 1999 after working at the University of Manchester. Before working in higher education, I undertook several administrative jobs within the UK’s National Health Service and even spent some time as a Health Promotion worker with MESMAC, a sexual health organisation. I’m interested in how people get different kinds of technologies to work for them on an everyday basis. I started out looking at this in the 1990s, generally in the workplace. However, since then I have found that developments outside work have tended to hold my attention more. I still do research about people and work, but given the way life is being played out in many (but not all) parts of the world I think there’s more to do beyond this. My current research agenda centres on analysing the development and use of social media such as those that support romantic relationships - internet dating (specifically Gaydar), those that are more focussed upon platonic relationships (such as Facebook), and Digital Gaming artefacts.