Morten
Bay
Morten
Bay
Tabs
Morten Bay is a British-Danish-American award-winning research fellow at the Center for the Digital Future and a lecturer in digital and social media at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He holds a PhD in information studies from UCLA.
Bay has spent the last two decades researching emerging technologies and their political, sociocultural, psychological and neurophenomenological impact. After 15 years of social media research, he pivoted to the study of AI and XR in 2021 and is currently involved in research on how AI and XR influence reality perception in humans and the implication of those effects on society.
He is also an ethicist, building normative ethics theory to inform policymaking and industry regulation related to emerging technology — and especially AI. Initial studies in these areas were covered in his 2025 book Mediating Plureality: Technology, Perception, and Ethics in a Divided Democracy (Bloomsbury Academic). Part of this research was awarded a “Best Faculty Paper” award at the International Communication Association conference in 2024. He also continues to do work in his tertiary research interest, the history of computing and networks, on which he has published extensively.
His previous research focused on persuasion in political communication on social media, its governance and its impact on democracy. Bay’s pre-UCLA research spawned four books published while he lived in Denmark, one of which, Generation Network (2018), earned him the Future Award from the Danish Academy of Strategic Foresight. He has also received awards from UCLA and the Society for the History of Technology.
As a policy consultant, Bay has advised agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services as well as the U.S. Army and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the Department of Defense. In Europe, he has led policy work in the EU and Danish parliaments and worked as a political communication strategist for high-level elected officials.
Alongside his political and academic work, Bay has worked as a journalist, writing feature articles and op-eds for American media outlets such as Slate, NBC News and Vice. As a speaker and consultant, Bay’s long client list includes Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, eBay and Novo Nordisk as well as media and communication companies such as NBC, PBS, Saatchi and Saatchi, MTG and the national broadcasters in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Early in his career, Bay was involved in a number of European technology startups, including services that pioneered early, legal music downloads for PCs in 2000 and for smartphones in 2004. He also created one of the first online recommendation engines based on micro-segmentation in 2005.
Outside his research and teaching, Bay is an active musician.
Books
Mediating Plureality: Technology, Perception, and Ethics in a Divided Democracy. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
Velkommen til Computopia (Gyldendal Copenhagen, 2014)
Homo Conexus - The Networked Humans - English ed. (Lulu Los Angeles, 2012)
Homo Conexus - Netværksmennesket (Gyldendal Copenhagen, 2009)
Generation Netværk (DR, 2006)
Refereed Journal Publications
“Big Tech Trajectories: Extensions of platform power in the emerging XR economy” w/ Joanne Gray, University of Sydney (Internet Policy Review, 2026)
“Arendt in the Metaverse: Four aspects of XR that threaten Democracy” (Convergence, 2023)
“Participation, prediction, and publicity: avoiding the pitfalls of applying Rawlsian ethics to AI” (AI and Ethics, 2023)
“The Political Life of GIFs: The Common Emotional Displays That Lets Us Disagree More Consummately on Social Media” (Invisible Culture 2022)
“Four critiques of Confucian virtues as technology ethics” (Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 2021)
“Hot potatoes and postmen: How packet switching became the ARPANET's greatest legacy.” (Internet Histories, 2019)
“Weaponizing the haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation” (First Monday, 2018)
“ Social media ethics: A Rawlsian approach to hypertargeting and psychometrics in political and commercial campaigns” (ACM Transactions on Social Computing, 2018)
“The ethics of unbreakable encryption: Rawlsian privacy and the San Bernardino iPhone” (First Monday, 2017)
“What is “internet”? The case for the proper noun and why it is important.” (Internet Histories, 2017)
“What is Cybersecurity?” (French Journal for Media Research, 2017)
“Who are the tech press darlings?” (Innovation Journalism, 2010)
Book Chapters
Chapter 2, “Conversations with a pioneer: Paul Baran in his
own words”;
Chapter 3, “Conversation with a pioneer: Larry Roberts on how he led the
design and construction of the ARPANET”;
Chapter 4, “Conversation with a pioneer: Leonard Kleinrock on the early days
of networking, the ARPANET… and winning in Las Vegas”;
in Brügger, N., & Goggin, G. (Eds.) Oral Histories of the Internet and
the Web. Taylor & Francis, 2022
Encyclopedia Entries
“Streaming media”;
“Advanced Eesearch Projects Agency Network (ARPANET)”;
In Borchard, G. (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of journalism, SAGE Publications, Inc. 2022