9/12/2021 The Social Net: Science News Online, May 4, 2002

Amid this online ferment, there's little that investigators know for certain.
Robert Kraut, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
was among the first to peer into the Internet's social side. "Scientists are
on the cusp of being able to say something sensible about the effects of
the Internet on social life," he says. "It's premature to make any sweeping
statements about what's going on."

Clash of the surveys

Several surveys have probed the social repercussions of Internet use.

They offer starkly different portraits of life online.

On the upbeat side, two national surveys of about 2,000 adults

each, conducted in 2000 and 2001 by the University of California, MacAdam
Los Angeles Center for Communication Policy, found that regular
Internet users reported spending as much time on most social activities as
nonusers did. The online crowd cut back on television time, watching the
tube 4.5 fewer hours per week than the no-Net group did.

National surveys in the same years, coordinated by the Pew Internet and
American Life Project in Washington, D.C., yielded even rosier findings.
Project researchers concluded that the online world is a "vibrant social
universe" in which people widen their contacts and strengthen ties to their
local communities.

Data published last November in the American Behavioral Scientist

supported the Pew findings. In national telephone surveys of as many as
2,500 people conducted annually from 1995 to 2000, Internet users
reported more community and political involvement, as well as more social
contacts, than nonusers did, reported sociologist James E. Katz of
Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and his colleagues.

A 1998 survey of about 39,000 visitors to the National Geographic Society

Web site also noted a social boost from Internet use. In this population,
which included many veteran Internet users, online interactions typically
supplemented in-person and telephone contacts, says University of
Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman.

However, two other national surveys, released in 2000, indicated that

regular Internet use may often lead people to spend less time with friends
and family. Stanford University researchers directed one survey (SN:
2/26/00, p. 135: http://www.sciencenews.org/20000226/fob8.asp). The
other was a joint project of National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family
Foundation, and Harvard University.

Internet users tend to be more sociable than nonusers to begin with

because they're better educated, wealthier, and younger, says Stanford's
Norman H. Nie. As people in this pair of surveys spent more time on the
Internet, though, they reported increasingly less face-to-face contact with
family and friends, according to Nie.

He finds this trend particularly troubling in light of evidence that community

involvement in the United States had already fallen substantially by the
time the Internet debuted. In Bowling Alone (2000, Touchstone), Harvard
political scientist Robert D. Putnam makes the case for a nationwide civic
retreat over the past 30 years.

Perhaps the most exhaustive attempt to see whether people tend to end
up computing alone occurred in England. University of Essex sociologist
Jonathan Gershuny directed a study of 1,000 randomly chosen
households in which adults kept a diary of their own and their kids' daily
activities over the same 1-week period in 1999, 2000, and 2001.

Internet users, who made up nearly half the sample by 2001, generally
engaged in as much social activity as nonusers, Gershuny says.
Moreover, those who first went online after entering the study showed big
boosts in the amount of time allotted to sociable leisure activities, such as
going to movies and eating at restaurants.

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