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Lonesome Internet blues, take 2
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Feb. 18, 2000 | "A Newer, Lonelier Crowd Emerges in Internet Study," blared the Times' front page on Wednesday. The Washington Post's cover similarly trumpeted "A Web of Workaholic Misfits? Study Finds Heavy Internet Users Are Socially Isolated." As with the widely discredited 1998 Carnegie-Mellon study that claimed Internet use made you sad and lonely, the findings of this new study -- by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society -- are highly questionable. But that hasn't stopped its conclusions from being reported as big news. So once more, with an inevitable feeling of déjà vu, let us descend into the trenches of study-demolishing and identify the self-contradictions in this latest attempt to brand Internet users as bummed-out bums. Point 1: Norman Nie, a Stanford professor who is the study's co-"principal investigator," identifies "a key finding" of the study: "The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend in contact with real human beings." Scott Rosenberg Point 2: The study reports that the overwhelmingly most popular use of the Internet -- far more widespread than e-commerce, chat or even Web surfing -- is e-mail. In other words: when it comes to human contact, in Nie's view, e-mail just doesn't count. I guess all those people you're exchanging e-mail with -- your family, friends, co-workers, long-lost school buddies, new friends you made in an online discussion -- aren't real human beings. Because you happen to be communicating with them via the Internet instead of the telephone or the postal service or a conversation on the street, they have become fake, and your "contact" with them has become a bogus exchange. All those headlines about "isolation" and "loneliness" drew on one of the study's most baleful findings -- that people who use the Internet a lot spend less time with friends and family and don't go out as often. But when you look closely at the survey's numbers this conclusion seems pretty insignificant. This chart tells the story: Here you can see that, for example, 27 percent of heavy Net users -- 10 or more hours a week -- report that they spend less time talking to friends and family on the phone. But then, 9 percent of people who spend an hour or less online a week report the same thing. (Maybe people are looking for any excuse not to call Mom, or maybe the "less time" here isn't a lot less time.) Meanwhile, a total of 15 percent of the same heavy Net users report "spending less time with family and friends"; 13 percent say they spend "less time attending events outside the home." Those figures are not landslide results -- only 1 in 7 of the most avid Internet addicts is hanging out less with "real human beings." A "newer, lonelier crowd" this does not make. Then notice how the study values phone contact -- despite its distance and technological mediation -- more highly than Internet contact. Consider that some significant portion of the drop in phone contact is probably a transfer of phone time to e-mail time. Throw in the likelihood (mentioned once in the study's summary) that some reduction in phone time in Internet households probably stems from a single phone line's being tied up by the modem. Before you know it, conclusive findings of increased "social isolation" quickly dissolve into a heap of misinterpretation.
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