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LonelyNet (Part Two)
The irony was pretty sharp as reflected in last week's "LonelyNet"discussion. Although by no means a scientific sample, hundreds of the very people portrayed as isolated from human contact by the Internet disagreed.
One of the questions that popped up continuously on Threads and via e-mail was puzzlement over why the Internet is so often portrayed as alarming, isolating, dangerous or de-civilizing.
One of the answers is obvious. The avatars of culture - academics, pundits, journalists - often use outdated notions to try and come to terms with a radically different kind of culture. They like Western Civ, Shakespeare and Classical Music, so if you don't, then culture is declining. They read papers and watched TV, so if you don't, you're withdrawing. The fact that you're doing new and different things, and defining culture and civilization differently, doesn't seem to matter. They link popularity, health and face-to-face relationships. If you don't, human links are being broken.
Thus the Stanford study measured isolation in part by dubious measures like whether you are reading newspapers, hanging out in groups, spenting time with members of your family f2f, watching TV less, or whether or not you shop in stores or online. The study doesn't count virtual contact as human contact. E-mail senders and recipients aren't people. Virtual communities aren't communities. Getting news online doesn't count as getting news. Contact with family online isn't contact with family, but something else.
Yet the hundreds of posts on Threads, almost to a one, suggested that Stanford's researchers must have gone to a different planet. Almost all of the responses, some of them eloquent and powerful, talked about the ways in which people used the Net to connect with friends, family and colleagues - not, as the study suggested, to withdraw from them.
This doesn't mean that some people don't spent more time online than is healthy, or in place of face-to-face contact, or that others aren't obsessive about gaming, programming or computing, which is often a passion, not a hobby.
But the study's main premise, reflected in headlines all over the country last week - that the Internet is promulgating a broad wave of social isolation - seemed completely at odds with the personal experience of the hundreds of people who took the trouble to post messages here and elsewhere on the Web.
The "Matrix" never seemed more on target. Increasingly, we live in parallel worlds.
"What's going on?," e-mailed Jeff from Ann Arbor, "I have the sense I've been reading stories and studies like this my whole life in papers, on TV and from academics and politicians. Yet my own experience couldn't be farther from the truth. Every single day of my life, I e-mail my sick grandmother, who I love very much, and she e-mails me back. No matter what else I do, I do that. I talk to my friends all day on AIM. I keep in touch with friends from high school. I send love notes to my girlfriend who's in another state, and keep the relationship going. I have long philosophical conversations with my Dad, who's better talking online than in person. I talk to my best bud, who's in Ohio. I meet people on MP3.com, and in chat rooms. I talk to other students about school and schoolwork. Is that in the Stanford study?"
No, it isn't. How come?
First, for obvious reasons. The Net is frightening to many of the most entrenched institutions in American life. What people fear, they viscerally attack.
But for the clearest explanation, it helps to look backwards, not forward, even though some dislike invoking history. Almost everyone reading this is part of something frightening and controversial. In one guise or another, technology has affected politics for hundreds of years - the industrial revolution and the rise of a technologically-based industrial society, the rise of the middle class for the first time in the world, mobility provided by cars, trains and planes, the specter of Utopia, raised by people from Jules Verne to Walt Disney, the rise of technologically-empowered elites, the liberation of sexual imagery, the explosion online of religious and spiritual conversations away from organized religion, environmental worries, the horrific toll of hi-tech warfare, the sudden power and importance of young geeks and nerds, the social, cultural and political trauma of rapid changes in the workplace, the rise of pop culture, alienation, leisure time and an explosion in information and the new freedom of individuals to express themselves.
With each passing day, it looks as if the Net, which no one foresaw, may end up being the biggest technological change in human history. So if history is any guide, it will be the most controversial.
Political scientist Langdon Winner:
"Technology and its various manifestations have become virtual obsessions in discussions about politics and society on a wide variety of fronts," he writes in "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought."
"Social scientists, politicians, bureaucrats, corporate managers, radical students, as well as natural scientists and engineers, are now united in the conclusion that something we call "technology" lies at the core of what is most troublesome in the condition of our world."
For ordinary people, too, change seems to be making life complicated and coming too quickly. The people who create technologies - computing, genetics, nano-technology, artificial intelligence - rarely do a good job of explaining what they're doing to the outside world, and the outside world is increasingly bewildered and unnerved by what these technological elites are doing. People often perceive technology as an oppressive force that poses a direct threat to human freedom, family, and stability.
The philosopher Paul Goodman once suggested that widespread unease about science and technology - from medieval Europe to the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution [certainly, to the rise of the Net and Web] - amounts to a religious upheaval similar to that of the Protestant Reformation.
In our time, the rise of new technologies, especially the Net, has triggered a wave of alarm and moral outrage, from concerns about pornography, thievery, addiction, cracking and national security, greed, the theft of intellectual property and last week, to the notion of culture that sees the Internet as pushing withdrawal from humanity itself.
Academics and journalists are often happy to sound alarms about the Net and the Web. Like Wall Street brokers and music and movie industry execs, they feel supplanted by the computer-empowered hordes who are suddenly setting their own agendas and having their own conversations. Politicians are increasingly nervous about so much sudden democracy in a political structure previously dominated by comfortably familiar special interests, from corporations to lobbyists to politician parties to journalists.
People who think nothing of giving their credit cards to strangers in restaurants are anxious about transmitting them online. Even though children are much more likely to be harmed by relatives at home than by going online, online predators are given explosive and completely disproportionate attention by journalists and politicians.
This doesn't mean that all studies and surveys about the Net are wrong, but it does possibly put them in a context that answers Jeff's question: What's going on?
Why are studies from reputable universities and other institutions so completely at odds with our own experiences?
That's my two bytes. Add more of yours below:
"80% of all purchasing decisions are made on the basis of color."
--Brand Packaging magazine
Serious--I actually saw that stat. Obviously a...bit shortsighted, but what's really scary is that somehow there was a study designed to prove that.
When all you've got is a vested interest in diagnosing physical isolation as personal isolation...
You design your study to get your nail.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
There are bags of resources on everything you want on the net. In one bag I'm your average everyday image of the geek (arrived at 8am, its 7:30 and I'm still at work), I'm reading the Cathedral and the bazaar, I update my PC on my own, it dual boots only for games, I bore everyone senseless with how great my job is and why every one should get into computing. I talk for hours at dinner with friends about the merits of XML/XSL and why Java should have multiple inheritance. Basically I put my girlfriend to sleep.
I spend an age on the internet, I check my email every 30 mins and there is normally something in it, I post to Slashdot and log on at the weekends.
So I must be a social reject. Well I'd like to speak up on behalf of all of those coders, hackers and internet junkies who also live to snowboard, windsurf, jump off cliffs and generally blow our above average salries on the sort of life we dreamed of as a kid. I'm not the sort of hacker who has a problem raising his voice, who can't mingle and finds it difficult to mix at a party. I'm the out-going sort who is interested in everything, be it Shakespeare (last book I read was Henry V PartII), Max Ernst, or my girlfriend being a lingerie designer.
Most of these studies are cut and dried, people who use the internet lack social skills, they don't mix with people. And yet those who work in the world of Open Source email people all over planet earth. I'm sitting in the UK and today I helped out someone in a
In the end Ernest Rutherford was right...
All research in the field of human sciences can be summarised as some do, some don't
The purpose of life is to go on holiday.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
First of all, the concept of "loser" is so highly subjective as to be irrelevant to the discussion. Katz' article doesn't use the word, so critiquing it on that basis is spurious at best.
The point is, a bunch of researchers with a pre-defined notion of acceptable societal behaviour went out, selected a group of people without 'net access, gave them access, and then measured how they spent less time on other things. Given the finite nature of the day, spending any time online would necessitate spending less elsewhere, yet they had the gall to turn around and declare the Internet as a hindrance to social interaction, again based on their own view of what interaction ought to be.
Katz is saying here that he has seen posts and email that tells a different story, one that perhaps the researchers should have taken into account. Does the 'net isolate some people in a negative way? Probably. Are all regular 'net users anti-social? No way!
This was a badly designed study with poorly interpreted data, which was then, of course, presented even worse in the mass media that loves to feed paranoia.
Considering how many ACs post here regularly, and how many did stand up and say that maybe their online time isn't so great for their lives in response to this story, your observation here is incorrect. One guy even did post about how much better his family life was once he cut out a chunk of his 'net time. The point is, much as that may be true for some, evidence here (both named and anonymous) seems to indicate that social interaction is made better for others because of the Internet, and research groups making alarmist declarations of the degradation of society are more of a problem than any electronic medium.
Kimberly "'net goddess" Chapman
I have major depression, and just a few years ago it would have been severe enough to see me hospitalized. At its worst, my depression deprives me of my ability to interract with people in real-time, face-to-face. My mind slows to molasses as I try to figure out what I just heard, what it means, and how I should react to it. That leads to a self-consciousness that is debilitating enough in its own right.
But on the Net, "Nobody Knows You're Depressed". Why? Simply because the pace of interraction is under my control. I can even lurk for a while before jumping in, giving me time to "warm up" a bit. I have the luxury of time on my side, allowing me to read a post as many times as needed for it to sink into my head, and allowing me to take as long as I wish to reply.
Far from isolating me from society and social interraction, the Net is all too often the ONLY social interraction I am capable of!
More detail: I don't have to hassle with sales people and cashiers when I can shop online. In the past there have been times when I ate stale bread merely because I couldn't cope with going to the store. PeaPod fixed that.
Let me reiterate: Without the Net, I doubt I'd be able to take care of myself. I would be in some institution, consuming large quantities of insurance and public money, not to mention countless drugs. But, surprisingly, I'm not! I'm able to earn my living and survive, and I'm able to greet the world on my own terms.
There are those who would degrade my state of existence, or even pity me. Don't! I earn nearly six figures, and I have my friends, family and entertainments, despite my depression.
All due, in large part, to the Net.
The Net acts as a "buffer" between me and the "real" world. A world where the only meaningful alternative is hospitalization. This same buffer allows me to take a slow and gradual approach with therapy and counselling, rather than the hasty treatment and rush to discharge seen in most hospitals. Plus, in a hospital I would not be able to continue to make a living!
The Net represents a technology that is fundamentally connective, not isolative. For me, the Net is a "social prosthesis", much as a hearing aid is to a deaf person. It makes interfacing with the world easier, better, and even possible.
Is the "world" I'm connecting with something other than the "real world"?
For the present, it is the best world I am able to live in.
The worst thing about it? You can't get a hug on the Net.
- Bob
San Diego, CA
I haven't looked at the study in detail, but your dismissal of it is particularly weak. Your evidence? "Well, a bunch of guys emailed me and posted to Slashdot to say that they're not losers." For one, do you really expect people to post en masse saying, "Yeah, I guess I am a loser."?
Your rebuttal is easily invalid for two simple reasons alone:
Gotta give you an "F" on this one, Jon...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
There's two sides to this. One is that some people use the "square-headed girlfriend" for escape. They don't WANT to interact f2f. When they do, it's about the world in the box. This is, of course, bad, and generally to be avoided.
The flip side is those of us who use the box to augment, add to, facilitate, and generally improve the relationships we already have, or would not have had but for the wonders of modern technology. I know for myself that were it not for the Net I would still be single in Atlanta and miserable rather than married, in Seattle, and reasonably happy and improving. So there.
But there is a third possibility (sorry, Arlo) a third possibility that no one has considered yet.
It's quite obvious to the casual Slashdot reader (which is different from the casual observer) that Stanford ignored the reality of the situation. Nobody has yet bothered to ask why.
I think I know. Flame me if you think I'm out in left field, but here goes:
I think They are scared. "They" are the pointy haired bosses, the university deans, the brokers, everyone who's a middleman and raking in the cash. They see the potential for their power to slip away, for mere mortals to talk directly to God without purchasing an indulgence from the local priesthood. People like Bob Young and Jeff Bezos and a couple gents named Larry and you and me have, not overtly, but just as loudly, nailed our 95 Theses to the doors of Redmond and 1600 Pennsylvania.... and the fertilizer is beginning to hit the rotating ventilation device. But it's no longer politic to simply send in the Knights Templar and squash the revolution. First you have to demonize it in the press. Alternatively you can attempt (Microsoft, Algore, AOL) to co-opt it for yourself.
[skip a bit, brother]
Ultimately it's about control. The Big Bwanas see us scurrying around down here plotting world domination and they don't like that idea because it means they'll have to drive a Neon instead of a Nine-Four-Four. So they get all het up about regulating the net and filtering it and keeping pr0n away from short people and bomb making info out of the hands of those Bearded Fellows (hey, I resemble that remark...) and ultimately grinding it down and mixing it with water and making it into the same kind of Soylent Green we've been sucking off the OTHER Glass Teat since our mothers were in grade school.
Bleah! Pfui! yak! barf. Get that stuff away from me, it rots your brain.
So what are we supposed to do about it anyway?
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Keep banging away at your Open Source projects, keep hacking on wireless internet, keep sending those checks to EFF and friends, and above all, don't let the bastards get you down. Don't even let them slow you down. If it's obvious to you that they aren't interested in listening, put it in granny low, sound the horn, and floor it. They were warned.
The 21st century is coming thru, boys and girls, and we are in the driver's seat. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
--
My name.... is NEO!
Oddly enough, despite the often held belief that computers and internet are for the young, it's the elderly who are really getting their money's worth. The internet allows those people unable to get around easily to meet and talk to people of similar ages and with similar experiences. When you reach an age where most of your friends have passed on it's nice to have a place where you can make new friends.
Yes. I no longer meet my neighbors. Thanks to the internet I am able to keep in touch with friends who actually know who Voltaire is. I can discuss my latest problems with my child with my friends two time zones away, who also have a child of the same age. I can communicate with people of a similar mind and IQ regardless of their age, race, religion, profession, or location. I can have my opinions challenged and even rated on Slashdot.
I met my wife on a WWIV BBS. If it hadn't been for the interaction we obviously didn't have over the modem lines I would have never married her...
I live in Nebraska. My son (age 7 months) has grandparents in Washington and Seattle. We have friends and family all over the U.S. (plus a few Aussies). I can put his latest photos on his web page and everyone can see him without me trying to send photos all over heck and creation.
I have come to a conclusion. The study at Standford was done by human beings, and published on the interent. As I have not had physical contact with these human beings, I cannot possibly be considered to have interacted with them. Therefore I cannot have been influenced by them. Therefore I cannot consider myself to have been informed by their research. Therefore their study is meaningless to me and to all others who have seen it.
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No Zen is good zen