What is e-Society?

Why go to the supermarket, when you can fill up your virtual basket in half the time? Who are your children chatting to for hours online? Text your local MP, diagnose an illness or search for a new house online....Our day-to-day practices are changing at an unprecedented speed. As we become more and more attached to digital technologies, there is a growing need to understand their immediate and long-term implications...

The ESRC E-Society is the largest ever-academic research programme to investigate the impact of digital technologies, particularly the internet on society. Original and insightful findings from the programme are already helping both policy makers and industry to respond better to the needs and demands of the new e-society citizen.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and now run out of the Department of Sociology at the University of York, this £6.5 million programme draws on the expertise of leading academics from across the UK. Launched in October 2003, the programme will run until the end of October 2007.

Twenty-eight projects from across the social sciences are producing key findings in six related areas of research:

• children and the e-society
• cities and neighbourhood change in an e-society
• health and health services in an e-society
• privacy, identity and trust in an e-society
• socio-political divisions and change in an e-society
• work, consumption and business in an e-society

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