Table of Contents

Virtual Communities and Social Capital; Human Capital Issues and Information Technology; the Progress of the Internet; the Co-Evolution of Society and Multimedia Technology; the World Wide Web and Local Media in the 1996 Presidential Election; Electronic Communities - Assessing Equality of Access; Ethics, Law and Information Technology - the Transformative Role of Rhetoric; Creating a Democratic Public Sphere through Political Discussion; Changing Roles in Information Dissemination and Education; Technological Change, Virtual Learning and Higher Education - Prospects, Problems, Potentials; the Role of Information Technology in Quality Education; the Paradox of Paperless Classes; Personal Computers, Mass Media and Other Uses of Free Time; Manufacturing Knowledge - Technology, Culture and Social Inequality at Work; Researching Telework - Past Concerns and Future Directions; the Information Age - Apartheid, Cultural Imperialism or Global Village?; Networking for Sustainable Development - Innovative Approaches Outside the "Global Village"; Information in and on Africa - Past, Present and Future; World Information Flows and the Impact of New Technology; International Network for Integrated Social Science.

About the Author

G. David Garson is a full professor of public administration at North Carolina State University, where he teaches courses on American government, research methodology, computer applications, and geographic information systems. He was the recipient of the Donald Campbell Award (1995) from the policy studies organization, American Political Science Association, for outstanding contributions to policy research methodology and of the Aaron Wildavsky Book Award (1997) from the same organization. He is the author of Guide to Writing Quantitative Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Dekker, 2001), Neural Network Analysis for Social Scientists (1998), and Computer Technology and Social Issues (1995). In addition he is editor of Social Dimensions of Information Technology (2000), Information Technology and Computer Applications in Public Administration: Issues and Trends (1999), and the Handbook of Public Information Systems (1999). He has also authored or edited 17 other books and authored more than 50 articles. For the last 20 years he has served as editor of the Social Science Computer Review and is on the editorial board of four additional journals.