John B. Thompson is a Sociology professor at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. He has studied the influence of the media in the formation of modern societies, a subject on which he is one of the few social theorists to focus. One of the key themes of his work is the role of the media in the transformation of space and time in social life, and the creation of new forms of action and interaction beyond temporal and spatial frameworks. Influenced strongly by hermeneutics, he studies communication and its uses, and links it closely with social context. Other key concepts are the transformation of visibility, the media and tradition, and identity and the symbolic project His book Ideology and Mass Culture is a study of what the theory of ideology entails in modern society.
