Tony D. Sampson is an academic author whose research connects digital communication, social media marketing, and politics. He is a Reader in Digital Communication at the University of Essex Business School and co-founder of the Cultural Engine Research Group. Author of several books including Virality, A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media, and The Assemblage Brain, his work examines how networked media environments and platform business models shape behaviour, attention, and political life.

He is currently working on a new book, The Struggle for [User] Experience: Birth, School, Work, Death, with the University of Minnesota Press. The project extends his analysis of digital influence by examining how the logic of user experience design and marketing increasingly structures institutions and everyday practices across the life course.