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Funded by The
National Science
Foundation, the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland is
developing a set of resources to further the scientific study of the
impact of the Internet on Societies. Central to this is understanding
the transformative effect—both positive and negative—that the Internet
has on human behavior and how the emerging persistent behaviors enable
and constrain activities, understanding, knowledge, and culture.
This research project is headed by
Dr. John Robinson,
Dr. Alan Neustadtl, and
Dr. Meyer Kestnbaum, all at the
University of Maryland. Additional support and cooperation has come
from the University of California, Berkeley, The University of
Pennsylvania, Annenberg School, Princeton University, and Stanford
University. We also have two
advisory boards, one internal and one external to the University of
Maryland.
This project is coordinating several efforts to test
competing theories and hypotheses about the Internet's impact on
society, including functional equivalence and time displacement,
declining social capital, classic innovation diffusion, and reconfigured
social networks. This work carried out in following ways:
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