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Lonesome Internet blues, take 2 | page 1, 2
Nie interprets his findings in full-bore cautionary mode: "The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it," he argues. Meanwhile, his study reports that the longer you've been online, the more hours per week you're likely to spend on the Net: In other words, as people get more familiar with what the Internet has to offer and more comfortable with it, they spend more time with it. Scott Rosenberg Are all these people knowingly choosing "social isolation" as they get to know the Net? Are they all helplessly enthralled by the new technology's seductive powers even as it is sucking their lives dry of human connection? Or do they understand the Net better than Nie -- and realize that they aren't "reducing participation in communities" but rather spending time in different kinds of communities, whose members communicate online and group themselves based on choice and interests rather than accidents of geography? If you're interested in the ever-burgeoning field of bad Internet research it's worth your time to look up the Stanford report's findings yourself. Each reasonable result is matched by a failure of interpretation: For example, the researchers found that Net users spend more time working at home than non-Net users, but they never seem to have asked whether Net users might be grabbing some time at work for personal online communication ("goofing off"). Some critics have raised questions about the Stanford study's methodology: Researchers collected their data via online surveys, so in order to get answers from their non-Internet users they gave those people Internet hookups -- which sure seems like it would turn them into Internet users pretty fast. And of course any study based on self-reporting is suspect: There are, notoriously, often discrepancies between what people actually do with their time and what they say they do with their time. Still, the biggest questions this story raises for me aren't about the research at all but about the journalistic response to it. Why is the media so invested in the notion that Net users are lonely "misfits" when the evidence is so scant? What is it about negative reports on Internet use that causes a newspaper editor to salivate? Whence arises the schadenfreude-fueled glee that the print media often seems to take in telling us that the Net can wreck your life? Well, one of the study's findings is that -- surprise! -- Internet use steals time people used to spend reading newspapers and watching TV. (The chart's here.) In a sense, then, the mass media's message is: If you leave us for that new Internet thing, you're gonna pay the price. Now, we all know that you're unlikely to be able to share a coffee or a beer with a newspaper reporter or a TV anchorperson, and rarely will either of them give you a hug. With the Net, on the other hand, it's a lot easier to join a discussion or send e-mail to gripe with a friend about some pathetic TV show or argue with a columnist's rant. According to the Stanford study, in the same heavy-Net-user group where 15 percent spend less time with family and friends, 65 percent are spending less time watching TV. So unless you believe that staring at the tube is less isolating than conducting an e-mail correspondence, I'd say that represents a healthy net gain in the sum of human connection. But you'd never know it from reading the papers. Which, come to think of it, may help explain why Net users are abandoning traditional media in the first place: The more you know about the Net the less easy it is to swallow the way it's so often misrepresented on the front page.
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