The Internet in Everyday Life

Speaker
Barry Wellman
Professor of Sociology and NetLab Director, University of Toronto

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

How does the Internet affect social capital in terms of social contact, civic engagement, and a sense of community? Does online involvement increase, decrease, or supplement the ways in which people engage? Our evidence comes from a 1998 survey of North American and worldwide visitors to the National Geographic Society website, one of the first large-scale web surveys. We find that online social contact supplements the frequency of face-to-face and telephone contact. Online activity also supplements participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Frequent email users have a greater sense of online community, although their overall sense of community is similar to that of infrequent email users. The evidence suggests that as the Internet is incorporated into the routine practices of everyday life, social capital is becoming augmented and more geographically dispersed. This is true both in North America and globally: unAmerican Internet users differ from Americans more in their demographic characteristics and length of Internet use than in how they behave online and offline.

Speaker's Bio

Professor Barry Wellman studies networks: community, communication, computer, and social. His research examines virtual community, the virtual workplace, social support, community, kinship, friendship, and social network theory and methods. Based at the University of Toronto, he directs the NetLab, teaches at the Department of Sociology, does research at the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, the Knowledge Media Design Institute, and the Bell University Laboratories’ Collaborative Environment Lab, and is a cross-appointed member of the Faculty of Information Studies. He is a Fellow of IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, and a committee member of the Social Science Research Council’s (and Ford Foundation’s) Program on Information Technology, International Cooperation and Global Security. He is the (co-)author of nearly three hundred articles, co-authored with eighty scholars, and is the (co-)editor of three books.

Speaker's Website
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/vita/index.html

Host
Robert Kraut