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. 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.