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Social Change, Daily Life and the Internet

Chimera Working Paper 2005-07

Friday 18 November 2005

The increasing pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has fuelled a major academic controversy about their social consequences. Despite ICTs encompass various technologies which are now widely available, the debate has been crystallizing on the narrower question of the consequences of the Internet on social capital. In this paper I critically review the theoretical and empirical background of this debate.

Text available here (see the Download section) and on the website of Chimera. I wrote this working paper during the few months of 2005 I worked at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Essex) on a project directed by Jonathan Gershuny and Ben Anderson.