For over fifteen years, Dr. Mary Chayko has investigated the experience of digital connectedness – how it feels, how bonds and groupings are made and maintained online, and how the online and the offline intersect in people’s everyday lives. She finds that the online, digital realm is experienced as real in every way — emotional, intimate, and communal — and that it tends to prompt, rather than to deter, physical social interaction and local community ties. In this talk, she will share her research into the nature of digital connectedness and its impact on members’ “techno-social” lives.
Dr. Mary Chayko is a sociologist, Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, where she is also the co-chair of the School’s Social Media & Society Cluster. She is the author of Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age, Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Connectedness (both with SUNY Press) and the forthcoming Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life (2016, Sage Publications). She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology, and Ed.M. in Psychology, from Rutgers University.