Eszter Hargittai

Who is Eszter Hargittai?

Eszter Hargittai is a sociologist at Northwestern University. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar.

She is currently Delaney Family Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project.

She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a fellow at the Institute for International Integration Studies, Trinity College Dublin. Currently, she is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

She is a member of the group blog Crooked Timber. She has been writing at Eszter's Blog since 2002.

Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of information technologies with a particular interest in how IT may contribute to or alleviate social inequalities. She has studied the differences in people's Web-use skills, the evolution of search engines and the organization and presentation of online content, political uses of information technologies, how IT are influencing the types of cultural products people consume, and geocaching.