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Bulletin: The Net Isn't Dehumanizing!
The results of this study contradict years of short-sighted, phobic reports to the contrary, but you probably won't see them on the front pages of your local paper, or see the study leading the evening news. "The Net is neither isolating nor dehumanizing" would make a lousy headline, and a worse debate soundbite. George Bush won't add this to his "Dark Hearts and the Net" riff, and Gore and Lieberman won't cite it in their anti-"cultural pollution" or stop-the-video-game campaigns.
You can find the study, which was reported by the Associated Press, in the tech section of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune site and a handful of sites and papers here and there.
The findings shouldn't be a huge surprise to Net users, but it ought to come as a huge shock to the rest of this country's grown-ups. More than 75% of the people polled said they don't feel as if they're being ignored by relatives and friends as a result of chat-room activity. In fact, the majority of Net users said e-mail, Web sites and chat rooms have a "modestly positive impact" on their abilities to make new friends and communicative more with family.
If stupidity, hysteria and ignorance were crimes, lots of journalists and polticians would be calling lawyers about now. There are few more widely propagated stereotypes than the idea that the people reading this column are isolated and alienated from other humans as a result of the time they spend online gaming, squabbling, yakking and programming. The study is overdue, but it's probably small comfort to the people who've been berated for the perils of spending time online for much of their lives.
The study surveyed the opinions and online habits of 2,096 respondents -- both Net users and non-users. More than 70% of parents said their children's grades are neither helped nor hurt by Internet activity. Nearly two-thirds said they now buy less from traditional retailers, as opposed to shopping online. Lack of privacy was the biggest concern of the Net users surveyed, who said that few fear the government watching them, but most fear invasive corporations tracking their behavior. Curiously, the study was funded by the National Science Foundation as well as AOL, Microsoft, and the Walt Disney Corp. Officials of the Pew Internet and American Life Project were quoted as saying the report supports their own findings that the Net is a tool that unites more people than it isolates.
The UCLA study has other interesting findings: 66.9% of Americans use the Net; 54.6% use e-mail. More than 86% of Americans with college degrees use the Net regularly; 78.7% of adults say children in their households spend an appropriate amount of time online. More than 70% of adults say the grades of kids who use the Net don't fall. The top five Net activites? Web surfing or browsing, 81.7%; E-mail, 81.6%; Seeking hobby information, 57.2%; finding entertainment information, 54.3%.
Oh, yeah: 75.3% of Internet users say they never feel ignored by other people because of the Net. This is a good survey to print out, store in your computer or print out and put in your wallet. Unfortunately, you still need it.
Most of the conclusions presented in this report and others like it depend on data that itself depends upon the subjects determining causal relationships for themselves. How accurate will data gathered from self-reporting respondents be? A subject claiming to be unaffected by net use and external data proving her to be unaffected are two different things.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
is why there's all this hand-wringing about the Net supposedly leading to social isolation etc. etc., yet you pretty much never hear people whining about television having these effects. When you consider that the Net can involve actual social interaction and TV pretty much by definition can't, this is...odd.
Feed the groupthink! One survey suddenly proves the internet is harmless? Puuuhlease. You know this was partially funded by corporations that just happen to have a vested interest in the results? Now I'm not saying it was rigged, but you guys can at least be consistent. Ignore it like you would any other corporate funded study.
This survey probably wasn't rigged, but come on. There are lots of ways to get the wrong results on a survey like this. Firstly, it seems as if most of the test only "asked" people if they felt like they were being cut off. Well, I don't know about you, but very few people with problems with admit that they have it (even to themselves). Secondly, the internet has only made itself into America's living room in the past year or two. Don't assume that just because it's got a huge market share now, that all those users have been using the net with any regularity for a significant amount of time. Thirdly, I believe Katz and this survey quoted about ~75%, that's still a significant percentage who are reporting problems. That remaing ~25% could be all over the map, maybe 1% with serious problems. Fourthly, because this study is so broad, you can't ignore the fact that most of the users are so new that it's unlikely that they'd have problems even if the internet were known to be harmfull in extreme. In other words, this doesn't mean the internet hardened geeks of the world that have been using it for years have nothing to worry about.
Maybe this is going a little too far, but I believe you'd see similar numbers if you were to introduce alchohol and do a similar survey. Do you feel you're an alchoholic? Of course not. Do you know anyone that's become an alchoholic after only moderate use? Similarly, most people who drink alchohol don't abuse it, but some do.
It's clear that the internet offers undeniable benefits, even some social ones (i.e., to communicate via email with friends). It may be very positive on the aggregate, but I am convinced that there is also a significant bad element in it. I am convinced that excessive usage of stuff like slashdot, IRC, ICQ, IM, etc are going to be a real cause of tension in relationships and what not in the coming years. I've seen enough of it first hand to know that it's there. Anyways, the point is this survey has done nothing to dissuade me. Katz is wrong to trumpet it like it means you can just scoff at any criticism.
I don't know how many fat people I hear saying that they don't know why they're fat. "I don't eat too much." Many alcoholics insist that alcohol isn't their problem, ditto drug addicts and drugs, etc.
Why is this relevant? The whole thing was about surveying people's opinions. I know at least half a dozen co-workers who go home and surf their home internet kiosks until it's time to sleep or turn on Star Trek. Repeat until dead. And it's like digging a tick out of a long-hair to pry some of these people off their systems and get them to join the lunch crowd for some face time. Even more fun to get them to speak more than a few sentences.
The net gives an opportunity for the messed-up weirdos of the world to show their faces in "public." Think about it: What kind of person does it take to violently argue the superiority of the Dreamcast over the PS2? Or KDE vs. Gnome? I'm not talking about technical nitpicking, but hardcore goofiness like posting phony (negative) reviews of KDE in order to boost Gnome, or posting slams at Linux every time a BSD story is posted. That kind of behavior is seriously messed up.
In the ensuing years, however, the rise in commercialization of the whole thing has led me to limit my use to email with friends, information gathering and buying stuff.
I spend about 1/10th of my work day on the net, and maybe 20 minutes a week when I'm home. It has not turned into the "television replacement" that was forecast a while back, and neither myself nor my nine year old daughter finds it all that entertaining.
Chat rooms seem to be a wasteland of children and idiots constantly on with their LOL and BRB, and I can't imagine anyone finding that to be a great use of time.
I think what keeps useage (and social isolation) down is the lack of community with a point -- it's one thing to go sit in a restaurant with friends talking, and quite another to slog through banner ads, only to find your communications inundated with the ROTFLMAO crowd.
In this study people are more likely to respond in socially desirable ways. By analogy, an alcoholic may not be willing to admit that his/her drinking has negative effects.
It's definitely good to see studies focusing on the fact that the Net isn't that bad (or is even, gasp, good), but we shouldn't give too much credence to this study in contrast to others. If we're interested in the truth, we should be willing to consider the fact that certain aspects of on-line life may not be very healthy.
On a related note, for a thorough analysis of the importance of "social capital" see Robert Putnam's new book "Bowling Alone."
Why? Because I met my wife on the internet. That has always been a big issue amongst my family. They're all small-town people, farm workers, with no use for a computer, and here their family member got swept up and married to someone he didn't even know. NOT!
The internet supplements your life. It allowed me to find friends that weren't just about drinking, smoking, and football. It allowed me to spend my days hanging with the guys, then go home in the evening and have meaningful discussions about topics that I enjoy.
And that's how I met my wife, as a friend on irc. Then we just decided to meet (2 hours apart), as friends, after talking for over a year. Then we continued meeting as friends every weekend til we began meeting as a couple. Then a year after that, we got married.
Just because a majority of my friends that I enjoy are on the internet doesn't mean that I shut out everyone around me (which my family now believes). They just can't understand that when I go to family reunions, I don't want to talk about deer hunting, or college football, or how Michelle drove the tractor for the first time. I want to talk about life, psychology, why we do the things we do, where we are all going, and how to root a solaris box.
Simply because most people believe that the net has had a positive effect on their social interaction doesn't necessarily mean that it has. It seems to me that before any realistic conclusions can be drawn about the matter, there should be an actual psychological study done which rates the net's effects based on actual evidence. It's just as logical to conclude from these findings that net use leads to denial as that it has no social drawbacks.
"Yup," you sound a bit elitist, you city slicker! Nothing wrong with pickups or beer from a can, as long as it's not something icky like Budweiser. ;-)
Seriously, I owe a lot to my hillbilly roots.
I have a father who worked hard (in a steel foundry) for thirty years to make sure his children had every opportunity he could give them. I am trying to do as well for mine. Largely because of him, I worry more about carpal tunnel syndrome than steel dust in my lungs.
I had a family and community which taught me basic values like honesty, hard work, looking out for your family and neighbors, etc.
When I go back to my home town, I enjoy talking both to the beer swillers about their "mundane" interests. I also enjoy talking to those small-towners who are cruising the web and publishing web sites. I don't demand that you should enjoy both, but your "disgust" disgusts me.
Jeff (a pickup-driving, suburb-dwelling, hillbilly with a Ph.D.)
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
The tough part is that because their arguments are so emotional these people are hard to combat. In public debate you really can't come right out and say "Sorry ma'am, your son is of weak mind" because that only adds to the emotional mindset. You can only try to hope that people can see through all the hype and use logic. The ability of the Jerry Springer show to hold an audience and continue to find people willing to appear on the show indicates that this isn't a strong point of the some folks.
Icebox
Hey! Reading Slashdot, half-empty, Kuro5shin, etc. has a very positive social effect... I get to talk to fu_man, Misfit, nebby... :-)
Hey, what's all those green and brown things outside my window. They kinda remind me of binary trees...
The net is full of dangerous people
:)
No. It isn't nearly full yet. There's plenty of more room for perverts, sickos, and chimps on the net. In fact, I go whole days on the web/IRC/AIM/freechess/Slashdot without running into any obviously maladapted folks. Adding Usenet to the mix can quickly change that, but even then, staying out of certainly binary-centric groups seems to work well. I'm guessing that the internet is no more replete with the bad people than the average corporate office, shopping mall, post office, university, major league sporting event, or sidewalk.
Finally, as far as your rhetorical sisters and daughters are concerned, I really think they have more to worry about from their friends and family than they do from anonymous strangers on the net. All of the feminist readings I've done and women I've discussed this with indicate that family members or date-rapists (and party-rapists) are far more to be feared than someone online.
You don't need to be extra careful WHO you are chatting with, you need to be careful WHAT you are chatting about and HOW MUCH you tell potentially threatening individuals that may help them injure you (and to be aware of data about you that may be available which helps them fill in the blanks). Finally, although I have to say I wouldn't want my rhetorical daughter to be sex-chatting some old guy, I certainly would think that if I felt she had made the decision to do so in full awareness (and was old enough to understand the conversation), that such behavior was harmless. However, if that guy showed up my rhetorical house seeking that rhetorical daughter, he would be greeted with some rhetorically heated lead fired from a rhetorical shotgun and dumped in a rhetorical body of water. Rhetorically speaking of course.
I do not have a signature
I mean, think back to 1453. Remember the chilling effects Guttenberg's printing press had on society? Suddenly, there were all these habitual readers, devoting dangerously large blocks of time to nothing but reading, completely ignoring such time-honored, socially recognized traditional activities as hard manual labor, angry mobbing, pennance, and feudal servitude. Eventually, society was so radically transformed that nobody from that period would even be able to recognize it today. It's a wonder humankind managed to survive!
Looks like we've realy dodged a bullet on this one, thank goodness. I just hope that the research is right--imagine what might happen if the Internet were to have a similar effect on our society as Guttenberg's infernal contraption had on his own...*shudder*
Obliteracy: Words with explosions