Keith N. Hampton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, he was an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Assistant Professor and Class of '43 Chair in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He received his PhD and MA from the University
of Toronto in sociology, and a BA in sociology from the University of
Calgary. His research interests focus on the relationship between information
and communication technologies, social networks, and the urban environment.
Recent projects include:
Social Interaction in Public Spaces: A Longitudinal Study -
This study utilizes an archive of Super 8 time-lapse films of public spaces from New York and around the world that were made in the 1970s through
the present day by William H. Whyte and the Project for Public Spaces. The content of these tapes is being compared qualitatively to digital video
of the same and comparable public spaces captured 2007-2010. The goal is to measure change in everyday public interactions over time and as result
of mobile phones and other societal changes.
Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community Survey -
A nationally representative telephone survey of 2,500 adults. This project examines the role of the Internet and mobile phone in how people interact with members of their social networks. Results from this national survey explore the role of new technology in social isolation, the size and diversity of core networks, participation in neighborhoods, voluntary groups, public spaces, and the diversity of people's social networks. Key findings challenge previous research and fears about the harmful social impact of new technology
Lost-letter Experiment - A variation on Stanley Milgram's lost-letter technique. In the summer of 2001 more than 5,000 stamped and self-addressed letters were "lost" in 80+ urban areas in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia. The proportion of returned (open/unopened) letters from each area is an indicator of helping behavior. In the summer of 2011 the project entered its second phase, letters were "lost" again in the same small urban areas. Variation will be explored over time (pre and post 9/11 / 2001-2011), country, urban area (using census data), and as a result of information and communication technologies.
The Social Life of Wireless Urban Spaces -
It is unclear if wireless Internet use in public spaces will facilitate greater engagement with co-present others, or encourage social disengagement. This study investigates how mobile
technologies, focusing on Wi-Fi use but not excluding mobile phones, video games, portable music devices, etc., impact the use of public space.
Updating William H. Whyte's classic study of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, this project is based on observations of
seven wireless Internet enabled public parks, plazas and markets in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. The goal is to identify how mobile devices
augment local interactions and people's social networks more broadly.
i-Neighbors.org -
A free, public resource at www.i-neighbors.org where people can find their geographic neighborhoods online
and form corresponding digital communities. The i-Neighbors project
investigates in detail the specific contexts where Internet use affords local
interactions and facilitates community involvement. i-Neighbors supports over 8,000 neighborhoods in the US and Canada and delivers over one million messages to neighbors each month.
e-Neighbors -
A longitudinal study that examined whether the Internet is increasingly a part of everyday neighborhood interactions, and in what specific contexts Internet use affords the formation of local social ties. This study also explored the relationship between new media and the size and composition of people’s personal networks. The project was a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study. It involved administering an annual survey to the residents of four, Boston area neighborhoods over a period of three years. Three of the four neighborhoods were given access to a series of basic Internet services designed to facilitate local communication and information sharing; the fourth neighborhood served as a control group. The study provided longitudinal data on the role of Internet use in neighborhood social networks and controlled for the influence of an experimental, community-networking intervention.
Netville - The Netville project was a window into the not so distant
future, providing a glimpse of how social relationships will change as
a result of computer-mediated communication (CMC). An ethnographic and survey-based study, located in suburban
Toronto the "wired suburb" of Netville was a three-year investigation
of how living in a newly developed residential community, equipped with
a series of advanced computer and communication technologies as part of
its design, affects work, community and family relations.
Please wait while my tweets load 
This paper is based on data that I collected with the Pew Intenret Project in 2008. The paper addresses two important questions:
- Are people’s social networks (the real stuff, not just Facebook) less diverse as a result of their participation in mediated activities? In other words, does the Internet create silos?
- If ICTs are are associated with higher levels of diversity, how does the diversity associated with online engagement compare to the diversity associated with offline engagement (in public spaces, voluntary groups, church, cafes, neighborhoods, etc)?
Findings provide very limited evidence that place-based relations have less resonance with internet users. A claim that the structure of personal networks has shifted from place-to-place to person-to-person underplays the continued role and technological affordances that are associated with traditional social settings. Place is not lost as a result of the affordances of new technologies – place-based networks are reinforced and made persistent. I argue, in contrast to a belief that networks would be more easily abandoned in the electronic age, social networks may be more persistent now than at any point in modern history. Not only are networks persistent over time, but they are increasingly pervasive and visible across what were once clearly articulated and bounded cliques. New technologies, such as the “status update” offered by many social networking services, afford opportunities for “pervasive awareness,” whereby individuals are regularly broadcasting and receiving information from their networks.
The pervasive awareness afforded by many new technologies has more in common with a traditional village-like community than it does with individualized person-to-person contact. Pervasive awareness provides a shared history, familiarity of daily labor, shared context, density, and public life that is reminiscent of traditional village life. The fundamental difference between a village-like community and the person-to-network structure that characterizes contemporary networks is the possibility for personal networks that are larger and more diverse than at any time in human history. I go on to explore how newer technologies, such as “social search,” in which the use of the internet to search for information privileges or limit exposure to information
collected or accredited by members of a person’s social circle, may promote prevailing ideology and information while omitting important bridges, divergent views, and unique resources that exist between networks – possibly reversing the trend found in this paper and the advantages of network diversity.
Find the n the NM&S website, or a draft on my site.
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