Documentation on this study is available from SIQSS:
Portrait
of a Newer, Lonelier
Crowd
Is Captured in an Internet
Survey
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN
FRANCISCO, Feb. 15 -- The nation's
obsession with the Internet is causing many
Americans to spend less
time with friends and family,
less time shopping in stores
and more time working at
home after hours, according
to one of the first
large-scale surveys of the
societal impact of the
Internet.
In short, "the more hours
people use the Internet,
the
less time they spend with
real
human beings," said Norman
Nie, a political scientist
at
Stanford University who
was
the principal investigator
for
the study.
Mr. Nie asserted that the
Internet was creating a
broad
new wave of social isolation
in the United States, raising
the specter of an atomized
world without human contact
or emotion.
That conclusion is certain
to
prove controversial because
some online enthusiasts
contend that the Internet
has fostered alternative
electronic relationships
that may replace or even
enhance face-to-face family
and social connections.
"This is not a zero-sum game,"
said Howard Rheingold,
author of "Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier" (Addison-Wesley,
1993).
"People's social networks
do not consist only of people
they see face to face. In
fact, social networks have been
extending because of artificial
media since the printing
press and the telephone."
The Stanford survey, which
was conducted by the
university's Institute for
the Quantitative Study of
Society and will be published
on Wednesday, appears
to offer an Internet-era
parallel to some of the findings
of "The Lonely Crowd," a
landmark sociological
analysis of American society
in 1950.
The book, written by David
Riesman with Nathan
Glazer and Reuel Denney,
described the changing
American character and chronicled
the shift away from
family and community-centered
life and the ascendance
of mass media.
The Stanford study, in turn,
details how the Internet is
leading to a rapid shift
away from mass media. The
study reported that 60 percent
of regular Internet users
said they had reduced their
television viewing, and
one-third said they spent
less time reading newspapers.
Those regular users, spending
at least five hours a
week online, represented
about 20 percent of those
surveyed and were the group
looked at most closely. In
all, the study found that
55 percent of those polled had
Internet access at home
or work and that 43 percent of
households were online.
And the study found evidence
that the Internet was
allowing the workplace to
invade the home. A quarter
of regular Internet users
employed at least part time
said the Internet had increased
the time they spent
working at home without
reducing the time spent at
work.
In the past Mr. Nie has been
the author of studies on the
decline of American
involvement in political and
community organizations.
He said that while much of
the public Internet debate
had been focused on the
invasion of privacy, little
study had been done of the
potential psychological and
emotional impact of what he
said would be more people
"home, alone and anonymous."
Mr. Nie, a co-author of the
study with Prof. Lutz
Erbring of the Free University
of Berlin, contended that
there was no evidence that
virtual communities would
provide a substitute for
traditional human relationships.
"If I go home at 6:30 in
the evening and spend the
whole night sending e-mail
and wake up the next
morning, I still haven't
talked to my wife or kids or
friends," Mr. Nie said.
"When you spend your time on
the Internet, you don't
hear a human voice and you never
get a hug."
The new study was based on
a sample of 4,113 adults
in 2,689 households. It
is the second major research
project to suggest that
the advent of the Internet may
have negative social consequences.
In August 1998 researchers
at Carnegie Mellon
University reported that
people who spent even a few
hours a week connected to
the Internet experienced
higher levels of depression
and loneliness.
In contrast to the Carnegie
Mellon study, which focused
on psychological and emotional
issues, the Stanford
survey is an effort to provide
a broad demographic
picture of Internet use
and its potential impact on
society.
"No one is asking the obvious
questions about what
kind of world we are going
to live in when the Internet
becomes ubiquitous," Mr.
Nie said.
"No one asked these questions
with the advent of the
automobile, which led to
unplanned suburbanization, or
with the rise of television,
which led to the decline of
our political parties."
"We hope we can give society
a chance to talk through
some of these issues before
the changes take place," he
said.
Americans overwhelmingly
use e-mail as their most
common Internet activity,
according to the Stanford
researchers.
Moreover, the report found
that most
Internet users treated the
network as
a giant public library,
albeit with a
commercial tilt.
Despite the general perception
that
the Internet has become
a vast
cybernetic shopping mall,
the Stanford study indicates
that only 25 percent of
the Internet users surveyed make
purchases online and that
fewer than 10 percent do
other types of financial
transactions online, like
banking.
Some critics strongly disagree
with the researchers'
assertion that the Internet
is leading to a new form of
social isolation.
"It's true by definition
that if you're spending more
hours hitting the keyboard
you're not spending time with
other people," said Amatai
Etzioni, a sociologist at
George Washington University.
"But people do form
very strong relations over
the Internet, and many of
them are relations that
they could not find any other
way."
Mr. Nie disagrees, arguing
that today's patterns of
Internet usage foretell
a loss of interpersonal contact
that will result in the
kind of isolation seen among many
elderly Americans.
"There are going to be millions
of people with very
minimal human interaction,"
he said. "We're really in
for some things that are
potentially great freedoms but
frightening in terms of
long-term social interaction."
--------------------
Philadelphia Inquirer story, Feb 17, 2000
A Net loss - or gain.
Study finds Web recluses; others see better connection
By Daniel Rubin
and Jennifer Weiner
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
Meet the sedentary, solitary and overworked denizens of the Internet.
Jill Maglione, 21, a University of Pennsylvania senior,
uses the Net to order kitty litter. Dan Orr, 24, a communications
graduate student at Penn, stays in touch with friends
from North Carolina to London.
And sophomore Meredith Lopez goes online to "e-mail my
dad for money, e-mail my mom to see how she is doing, e-mail or
instant-message my friends from home to tell them how
crazy the parties were last weekend."
None of them fits the profile of heavy Internet users
as anti-social loners, a picture painted by a Stanford University study
released yesterday that is already drawing criticism
from academics and Webheads.
The report by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative
Study of Society portrays a culture in which the wired are spending
less time with friends and family, fewer hours shopping
or watching television, more time working, and more time alone.
"The more hours people use the Internet, the less time
they spend with real human beings," said Norman Nie, a Stanford
political scientist who heads the institute.
Among the study's findings:
One-fourth of regular users - defined as those who spend
five or more hours online each week - said they were spending more
time working at home. At the same time, they weren't
cutting back their hours at the office. If anything, they were there longer.
Thirteen percent of the regulars reported spending less
time with friends and family. Eight percent said they went to fewer
social events. And 26 percent said they were talking
less to friends and family on the phone.
Sixty percent of them said the Web had reduced their television
viewing; one-third said they were spending less time reading
newspapers.
While the least educated and oldest Americans are more
often the ones without Internet access, once they are connected, their
use is similar to others.
Defenders of the Web have taken issue with the survey's dark view.
"By only focusing on what people don't do these days instead
of looking at what new and interesting things they do, you get a
very pessimistic picture," said James Katz, a communications
professor at Rutgers University.
"Just because a person is using the Web rather than watching
TV doesn't mean they're isolated," said Joseph Turow,
communications professor at Penn's Annenberg School of
Communication.
Some have questioned not only the study's provocative findings, but also the researchers' unusual methodology.
InterSurvey, a Menlo Park, Calif., company that Nie co-founded,
sampled the behavior of 4,113 adults in 2,689 California
households after supplying them with free Web TV, which
allows people to connect to the Internet through their television set.
This allowed the researchers to distinguish between new Internet users and those who already had access to the Web.
Katz questioned how much useful data can be drawn from
a study of Web TV users. "It's a very peculiar animal," he said. "It
represents a tiny sliver of Internet users."
Lutz Erbring, the report's co-author, said in a interview
yesterday that he was surprised by many of the findings, particularly
regarding how much time the Web appeared to be stealing
from television viewing.
"The longer they spent on the Internet, the more they
said they cut back on TV," said Erbring, a mass communications professor
at the Free University of Berlin who is on sabbatical
at Stanford. "You can't do Internet surfing as a background activity."
Another surprise for Erbring was that even those who spent
less than an hour a day on the Web reported talking on the phone
about one-quarter less.
As for e-mail, which more than 84 percent of the respondents
in the survey used, Erbring wondered yesterday if users were
substituting quantity of communications for quality.
"You can't hug a person over the Internet or drink a beer
with them," Erbring said. "It's a dead medium that carries the
message."
Despite the researcher's projection of an inert, reclusive
cyber-population, "it's not the end of society," Erbring said. "We're
not prophets of doom and gloom, but we are talking about
a clear time-budget effect."
And he cautioned that this anti-social shift is only the
beginning: "We have reason to believe that we're seeing the front edge
of
a wave that will actually get bigger as time goes on."
Research done by Rutgers professor Katz, however, suggests
that the Internet actually stimulates social engagement. Katz and
associate Philip Aspden concluded after a multiyear study
that "people feel part of a community online. . . . Rather than
detracting from the pleasures of the 'real world,' cyberspace
allows people to have new opportunities to make real friends all
over the world, and in some cases, these contacts lead
to face-to-face meetings."
The Internet, Katz said, might be a social outlet for those not able or inclined to be otherwise sociable.
"It's clear that a lot of people are afraid to go out
on the street at night, and this allows them to make all sorts of friends
without
any physical risk," Katz said. "It also provides an audience
and a community for creative efforts on the parts of millions, and I
mean that literally - for people to write stories, create
works of art, put up photographs, and share their experiences, to ask
questions, vent their feelings.
"I might mention," he added, "that not all of these are
socially beneficial. There are a lot of scams and filth on the Internet,
but
that is also true of every other city and every other
state. There's lots of bad stuff. There's lots of good stuff, too."
So does the Internet give us more community, or does it
pull us apart? Annenberg professor Turow says it's simply too early to
tell.
"There's a variety of ways to think about isolation,"
Turow said, "and lots of ways that people connect using the Web. It
doesn't mean there aren't problematic effects. It will
take time to sort out the implications of the Web, for the family in
particular. These are not simple issues."
© 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.