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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:
- Enhancing an interactive
statistical website at the University
of Maryland (where you are now)
that makes the latest national data sets (from both the U.S. and
other countries), research articles and research findings related to
Internet use and its possible impact, available on-line.
- Hosting up to 50 graduate and
undergraduate students from across the country participate in a
multi-week Summer
WebShop in which they discuss with leading research scholars current
theories, hypothesis and expectations concerning the Internet.
- Undertaking new data
collections to address controversies or missing variables in existing
data sets. The major vehicle for this purpose is the General
Social Survey (GSS), which has been monitoring social change for the
past 27 years and for which a new Internet module was included in the
year 2000 GSS.
- This project will educate
young researchers in studies of Information Technology. It will make
available new national data sets for dissertations and other research
studies. And it will extend and refine the General Social Survey to
include questions on Internet impact and use.
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