The social net: scientists hope to download some insight into online interactions

Science News, May 4, 2002 by Bruce Bower

Ten years ago, computer aficionados had the Internet pretty much to themselves. Today, their electronic playground has become a grand, weird, unpredictable social experiment. About half of U.S. households now have Internet access, although only 5 percent were connected in 1995. Europe and many other parts of the world also contain mushrooming numbers of Net users.

There's a complementary growth industry in studies of how this wildly successful technology affects social life. Behavioral scientists are grappling with a seismic shift in communication that's been more hospitable to armchair speculation than to empirical investigation.

Confusion about the social implications of new technology is hardly new. It existed in post-Civil War America, when booting up occurred mainly among cowboys. After inventing the telephone in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell described it as a broadcasting instrument that would perhaps provide "music on tap" Early telecom executives regarded the telephone mainly as a business tool. Nearly 50 years after the phone's invention, telephone companies finally realized that people wanted to use the product for talking with friends and family.

The Internet is poised to transform society far more profoundly than telephones, or even cell phones, have.

Two contrasting schools of cyber-thought offer explanations for what's happening. Optimists regard the World Wide Web and e-mail as realms for making and keeping friends, joining global communities, and exchanging ideas freely outside the bounds of oppressive government restrictions. Pessimists argue that online endeavors pull people away from real-world interactions, make them less concerned about their communities, and provide a forum for hate groups. They also charge that the Internet creates unprecedented opportunities for governments to monitor citizens' private lives.

Both views simplify an unsettled situation. Much of the Internet's allure lies in its flexibility. People adapt it to their own purposes, whether for good or ill. For instance, in the 48 hours after the terrorist attacks of last Sept. 11, more than 4 million people contacted family and friends by e-mail to check on their safety and used e-mail and the Internet to find out what had happened. Yet government investigations indicate that the Al Qaeda terror network used hard-to-trace e-mail missives to organize the attacks and has since expanded its Internet presence.

Amid this online ferment, there's little that investigators know for certain. Robert Kraut, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was among the first to peer into the Internet's social side. "Scientists are on the cusp of being able to say something sensible about the effects of the Internet on social life," he says. "It's premature to make any sweeping statements about what's going on."

CLASH OF THE SURVEYS Several surveys have probed the social repercussions of Internet use. They offer starkly different portraits of life online.

On the upbeat side, two national surveys of about 2,000 adults each, conducted in 2000 and 2001 by the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Communication Policy, found that regular Internet users reported spending as much time on most social activities as nonusers did. The online crowd cut back on television time, watching the tube 4.5 fewer hours per week than the no-Net group did.

National surveys in the same years, coordinated by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington, D.C., yielded even rosier findings. Project researchers concluded that the online world is a "vibrant social universe" in which people widen their contacts and strengthen ties to their local communities.

Data published last November in the American Behavioral Scientist supported the Pew findings. In national telephone surveys of as many as 2,500 people conducted annually from 1995 to 2000, Internet users reported more community and political involvement, as well as more social contacts, than nonusers did, reported sociologist James E. Katz of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and his colleagues.

A 1998 survey of about 39,000 visitors to the National Geographic Society Web site also noted a social boost from Internet use. In this population, which included many veteran Internet users, online interactions typically supplemented in-person and telephone contacts, says University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman. However, two other national surveys, released in 2000, indicated that regular Internet use may often lead people to spend less time with friends and family. Stanford University researchers directed one survey (SN: 2/26/00, p. 135). The other was a joint project of National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University.

Internet users tend to be more sociable than nonusers to begin with because they're better educated, wealthier, and younger, says Stanford's Norman H. Nie. As people in this pair of surveys spent more time on the Internet, though, they reported increasingly less face-to-face contact with family and friends, according to Nie.