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Abstract
The Internet is the latest in a series of technological breakthroughs in interpersonal communication, following the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. It combines innovative
features of its predecessors, such as bridging great distances and reaching a mass audience.
However, the Internet has novel features as well, most critically the relative anonymity afforded to users and the provision of group venues in which to meet others with similar interests and values. We place the Internet in its historical context, and then examine the effects of Internet use on the user’s psychological well-being, the formation and maintenance of personal relationships,group memberships and social identity, the workplace, and community involvement.
INTRODUCTION
It is interactive: Like the telephone and the telegraph (and unlike radio or television), people can overcome great distances to communicate with
others almost instantaneously.It is a mass medium: Like radio and television (and unlike the telephone or telegraph), content and advertising can reach millions of people at the same time. Although some welcome it as a panacea while others fear it as a curse, all would agree that it is quite capable of transforming society. Hard-nosed and dispassionate observers have recently concluded that the Internet and its related technologies
“...will change almost every aspect of our lives---private, social, cultural, economic and
political...because [they] deal with the very essence of human society: communication between people.
Earlier technologies, from printing to the telegraph...have wrought big changes over time. But the social changes over the coming decades are likely to be much more extensive, and to happen much faster, than any in the past, because the technologies driving them are continuing to develop at a breakneck pace.More importantly, they look as if together they will be as pervasive and ubiquitous as electricity.”
The Internet is fast becoming a natural, background part of everyday life. In 2002, more than 600 million people worldwide had access to it . Children now grow up with the Internet; they and future generations will take it
for granted just as they now do television and the telephone. In California, 13-year-olds use their home computer as essentially another telephone
to chat and exchange “instant messages” with their school
friends. Toronto suburbanites use it as another means of contacting friends
and family, especially when distance makes in-person and telephone communication difficult. And people routinely turn to
the Internet to quickly find needed information, such as about health conditions and remedies, as well as weather forecasts, sports
scores, and stock prices.
The main reason people use the Internet is to communicate with other people over e-mail---
and the principal reason why people send e-mail messages to others is to maintain interpersonal
relationships.In the 1990s telecom companies invested (and lost) billions of dollars in interactive television and in
delivering movies and video over the Internet.
No one today disputes that the Internet is likely to have a significant impact on social life; but
there remains substantial disagreement as to the nature and value of this impact. Several scholars
have contended that Internet communication is an impoverished and sterile form of social
exchange compared to traditional face-to-face interactions, and will therefore produce negative
outcomes (loneliness and depression) for its users as well as weaken neighborhood and
community ties. Media reporting of the effects of Internet use over the years has consistently
emphasized this negative view to the point that, as a result, a
substantial minority of (mainly older) adults refuse to use the Internet at all.
Others believe that the Internet affords a new and different avenue of social interaction that
enables groups and relationships to form that otherwise would not be able to, thereby increasing
and enhancing social connectivity. In this review, we examine the evidence bearing on these
questions, both from contemporary research as well as the historical record.
THE INTERNET IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Internet is but the latest in a series of technological advances that have changed the world in
fundamental ways. In order to gauge the coming impact of the Internet on everyday life, and to
help separate reality from hyperbole in that regard, it is instructive to review how people initially
reacted to and then made use of those earlier technological breakthroughs.
First, each new technological advance in communications of the past 200 years---the
telegraph, telephone, radio, motion pictures, television, and most recently the Internet---was met
with concerns about its potential to weaken community ties. The
telegraph, by eliminating physical distance as an obstacle to
communication between individuals, had a profound effect on life in the nineteenth century. The world of 1830 was still very much the local one it had always been: No
message could travel faster than a human being could travel (that is, by hand, horse, or ship).All
this changed in two decades because of Samuel Morse’s telegraph. Suddenly, a message from
London to New York could be sent and received in just minutes, and people
could learn of events in distant parts of the world within hours or days instead of weeks or
months. There was great enthusiasm: The connection of Europe and America in 1858 through
the transatlantic cable was hailed as “the event of the century” and was met with incredible
fanfare. Books proclaimed that soon the entire globe would be wired together and that this would
create world peace. According to one newspaper editorial, “it is impossible that old prejudices
and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of
thought between all the nations of the earth” . At the same time,
however, governments feared the potential of such immediate communication between
individual citizens. Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, for example, banned the telegraph as an
“instrument of subversion”. Similar raptures and fears have often been
expressed, in our time, about the Internet as well.
The closest parallel to today’s Internet users were the telegraph operators, an “on-line”
community numbering in the thousands who spent their working lives communicating with each
other over the wires but who rarely met face to face. They tended to use low-traffic periods to
communicate with each other, sharing stories, news, and gossip. Many of these working
relationships blossomed into romances and even marriages. For example, Thomas Edison, who
began his career as a telegraph operator, proposed to his wife Mina over the telegraph. And today, worldwide, people send each other more than a billion text
messages each day from their mobile phones, in a form of communication
conceptually indistinguishable from the old telegraph.
The telephone---invented accidentally by Alexander Graham Bell in the 1880s while he was
working on a multichannel telegraph---transformed the telegraph into a point-to-point
communication device anyone could use, not only a handful of trained operators working in
code. The effect was to increase regular contact between family, friends, and business associates,
especially those who lived too far away to be visited easily in person, and this had the overall
effect of strengthening local ties. Nevertheless, concerns
continued to be raised that the telephone would harm the family, hurt relationships, and isolate
people---magazines of the time featured articles such as “Does the telephone break up home life
and the old practice of visiting friends?”
The next breakthrough, radio, fared no differently. Like the wireless Internet emerging today,
radio freed communication from the restriction of hard-wired connections, and was especially
valuable where wires could not go, such as for ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication.
However, its broadcast capability of reaching many people at once---thousands, even millions---
was a frightening prospect for governments of the time. When Marconi got off the ship in
England to demonstrate his new invention to the British, customs officials smashed his prototype
radio as soon as he crossed the border, “fearing that it would inspire violence and revolution”. Eventually, however, radio brought the world into everyone’s living room and
so eliminated distance as a factor in news dissemination like never before. And indeed, it did
soon prove to be a powerful propaganda tool for dictators and democratically elected leaders
alike.
But it was television that had the greatest actual (as opposed to feared) impact on community
life, because individuals and families could stay at home for their evening entertainment instead
of going to the theater or to the local pub or social club. This negative effect of television viewing on the individual’s degree of
involvement in other, especially community, activities has been the basis for contemporary
worries that Internet use might displace time formerly spent with family and friends (e.g., Nie &
Erbring 2000).
Internet can serve for the individual user makes it “unprecedentedly malleable” to the user’s
current needs and purposes.
However, the Internet is not merely the Swiss army knife of communications media. It has
other critical differences from previously available communication media and settings (see, e.g.,
McKenna & Bargh 2000), and two of these differences especially have been the focus of most
psychological and human-computer interaction research on the Internet. First, it is possible to be
relatively anonymous on the Internet, especially when participating in electronic group venues
such as chat rooms or newsgroups. This turns out to have important consequences for
relationship development and group participation. Second, computer-mediated communication
(CMC) is not conducted face-to-face but in the absence of nonverbal features of communication
such as tone of voice, facial expressions, and potentially influential interpersonal features such as
physical attractiveness, skin color, gender, and so on. Much of the extant computer science and
communications research has explored how the absence of these features affects the process and
outcome of social interactions.
EFFECTS ON INTERPERSONAL INTERACTION
A good example of that approach is Sproull & Kiesler’s (1985) “filter model” of CMC, which
focuses on the technological or engineering features of e-mail and other forms of computerbased
communications. According to this perspective, CMC limits the “bandwidth” of social
communication, compared to traditional face-to-face communication settings (or to telephone
interaction, which at least occurs in real time and includes important nonverbal features of
speech). Sproull & Kiesler (1985) considered CMC to be an impoverished communication
experience, with the reduction of available social cues resulting in a greater sense or feeling of
anonymity. This in turn is said to have a deindividuating effect on the individuals involved,
producing behavior that is more self-centered and less socially regulated than usual. This
reduced-information model of Internet communication assumes further that the reduction of
social cues, compared to richer face-to-face situations, must necessarily have negative effects on
social interaction (i.e., a weaker, relatively impoverished social interaction). Note also that this
engineering or bandwidth model assumes that the “channel” effects of Internet communication
are the same for all users and across all contexts---in other words, it predicts a main effect of
communication channel.
Spears et al. (2002) contrasted the engineering model with the “social science” perspective on
the Internet, which assumes instead that personal goals and needs are the sole determinant of its
effects. According to this viewpoint, the particular purposes of the individuals within the communication setting determine the outcome
of the interaction, regardless of the particular features of the communication channel in which
the interaction takes place.
The third and most recent approach has been to focus on the interaction between features of
the Internet communication setting and the particular goals and needs of the communicators, as
well as the social context of the interaction setting .According to this perspective, the special qualities of Internet social interaction do have an impact on the interaction and its outcomes, but this effect can be quite
different depending on the social context.
Personal (Close) Relationships
EFFECTS OF INTERNET USE ON EXISTING RELATIONSHIPS On no issue has research on the
social effects of the Internet been more contentious than as to its effect on close relationships,
such as those with family and friends. Two studies that received considerable media attention
were the HomeNet project by Kraut et al. (1998) and the large-scale survey reported by Nie &
Erbring (2000; also Nie 2001). Both reports concluded that Internet use led to negative outcomes
for the individual user, such as increases in depression and loneliness, and neglect of existing
close relationships. However, nearly all other relevant studies and surveys---including a follow
up of the HomeNet sample by Kraut and his colleagues---reached the opposite conclusion.
Kraut et al. (1998) followed a convenience sample of Pittsburgh residents and their families
who as of the mid 1990s did not yet have a computer in the home. The researchers gave these
families a computer and Internet access, and then found after a two-year period a reliable but
small increase in reported depression and loneliness as a function of the amount of Internet use.
However, a later follow-up study of the same sample (Kraut et al. 2002) revealed that these
negative effects had disappeared, and instead across nearly all measures of individual adjustment
and involvement with family, friends, and community, greater Internet use was associated with
positive psychological and social outcomes. For example, the more hours the average respondent
spent on the Internet, the more (not less) time he or she also spent face-to-face with family and
friends.
In their press release, Nie & Erbring (2000) reported data from a U.S. nationwide survey of
approximately 4000 people, and concluded from those data that heavy Internet use resulted in less time spent with one’s family and friends. On the surface, this would seem to contradict the
Kraut et al. (2002) conclusions (and those of the studies reviewed below), but a closer look at the
actual findings removes the apparent contradiction. These reveal that over 95% of Nie &
Erbring’s (2000) total sample did not report spending any less time with family and friends
because of their Internet use; moreover, even among the heaviest users, 88% reported no change
in time spent with close others.
Several other national surveys have found either that Internet users are no less likely than
nonusers to visit or call friends on the phone, or that Internet users actually have the larger social
networks. Howard et al. (2001) concluded from their large
random-sample survey that “the Internet allows people to stay in touch with family and friends
and, in many cases, extend their social networks. A sizeable majority of those who send e-mail
messages to relatives say it increases the level of communication between family
members…these survey results suggest that on-line tools are more likely to extend social contact
than detract from it” (p. 399). Wellman et al. (2001) similarly concluded from their review that
heavy users of the Internet do not use e-mail as a substitute for face-to-face and telephone
contact, but instead use it to help maintain longer distance relationships (Wellman et al. 2001, p.
450).
Nie (2001) has responded to his critics by arguing that time is a limited commodity, so that the
hours spent on the Internet must come at a cost to other activities. “We would expect that all
those spending more than the average of 10 hours a week on the Internet would report
substantially fewer hours socializing with family members, friends, and neighbors. However, in the Nie & Erbring (2000) results, the real and substantial
decrease associated with heavy Internet use was in watching television and reading newspapers,
not in social interaction with friends and family.
RELATIONSHIP FORMATION ON THE INTERNET In the original study in this research domain,
Parks & Floyd (1995) administered a questionnaire concerning friendship formation to people
participating in Internet newsgroups (electronic bulletin boards devoted to special interest
topics). Results showed that on-line relationships are highly similar to those developed in person,
in terms of their breadth, depth, and quality. In another study, McKenna et al. (2002) surveyed
nearly 600 members of randomly selected popular newsgroups devoted to various topics such as
politics, fashion, health, astronomy, history, and computer languages. A substantial proportion of respondents reported having formed a close relationship with someone they had met originally
on the Internet; in addition, more than 50% of these participants had moved an Internet
relationship to the “real-life” or face-to-face realm. Many of these on-line relationships had
become quite close---22% of respondents reported that they had either married, become engaged
to, or were living with someone they initially met on the Internet. In addition, a two-year follow
up of these respondents showed that these close relationships were just as stable over time as
were traditional relationships (e.g., Attridge et al. 1995, Hill et al. 1976).
Follow-up laboratory experiments by McKenna et al. (2002) and Bargh et al. (2002) focused
on the underlying reasons for the formation of close relationships on the Internet. In these
studies, pairs of previously unacquainted male and female college students met each other for the
first time either in an Internet chat room or face-to-face. Those who met first on the Internet liked
each other more than those who met first face-to-face---even when, unbeknownst to the
participants, it was the same partner both times. Moreover, the studies
revealed that (a) people were better able to express their “true” selves (those self-aspects they
felt were important but which they were usually unable to present in public) to their partner over
the Internet than when face-to-face, and (b) when Internet partners liked each other, they tended
(more than did the face-to-face group) to project qualities of their ideal friends onto each other
(Bargh et al. 2002). The authors argued that both of these phenomena contribute to close
relationship formation over the Internet.
The relative anonymity of the Internet can also contribute to close relationship formation
through reducing the risks inherent in self-disclosure. Because self-disclosure contributes to a
sense of intimacy, making self-disclosure easier should facilitate relationship formation. In this
regard Internet communication resembles the “strangers on a train” phenomenon described by
Rubin (1975; also Derlega & Chaikin 1977). As Kang (2000, p. 1161) noted, “Cyberspace makes
talking with strangers easier. The fundamental point of many cyber-realms, such as chat rooms,
is to make new acquaintances. By contrast, in most urban settings, few environments encourage
us to walk up to strangers and start chatting. In many cities, doing so would amount to a physical
threat."Overall, then, the evidence suggests that rather than being an isolating, personally and socially
maladaptive activity, communicating with others over the Internet not only helps to maintain
close ties with one’s family and friends, but also, if the individual is so inclined, facilitates the
formation of close and meaningful new relationships within a relatively safe environment.
THE MODERATING ROLE OF TRUST
In important ways, using the Internet involves a leap of faith. We type in our credit card numbers
and other personal information in order to make purchases over the Internet and trust that this
information will not be used in unauthorized or fraudulent ways. We write frank and confidential
messages to our close colleagues and friends and trust that they won’t circulate these messages to
others. We trust anonymous fellow chat room and newsgroup members with our private thoughts
and dreams, and because of the intimacy such self-disclosure creates, come to trust them enough
to give them our phone numbers.
Or we don’t.Just as in close relationships, whether we are motivated to trust or not
to trust our interaction partners or website operators is an important moderator of how we
respond to the “limited bandwidth” and relative lack of information over the Internet, compared
to traditional social interaction and business transaction settings. As we have seen, negotiators
over the Internet react to the lack of information and cues they have regarding their opponents by
assuming the worst, and so interpret ambiguous data such as delays in e-mail responses as
evidence of sinister motives (Thompson & Nadler 2002). Yet after initial liking is established
while meeting a new acquaintance over the Internet, people tend next to idealize that person---
that is, assuming the best about them (McKenna et al. 2002). The difference between the two
situations is not the Internet, because its characteristics as a communication channel are the same
in both cases; the difference is in the social contexts and the different interpersonal motivations
and goals that are associated with the two contexts.
Trust turns out even to moderate differences in the rate of Internet adoption across countries.
Keser et al. (2002) correlated data on Internet adoption rates (proportion of homes with Internet
access) with answers to a question on the World Values Survey: “Can people generally be
trusted, or is it that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” The degree of trust within a
country, indexed by the percentage of respondents who gave the former instead of the latter
answer to the values question, explained nearly two-thirds of the national differences in Internet
adoption rate, and this relation holds after other possibly relevant variables, such as number of
computers in the country, are statistically controlled.
This is why “spam”---unsolicited junk e-mail with usually fake return addresses and often
fraudulent claims---is a real threat to the social life of the Internet: It threatens to undermine that
important sense of trust for many people. Today, spam constitutes nearly half of
all e-mail traffic, turning the most common activity on the Internet into an annoyance and chore
as users must sort through and delete the unwanted mail from their inboxes.
Fortunately, government and corporations appear finally to be recognizing the problem and
taking action to reduce and regulate junk e-mail. Here again, the Internet appears
to be following in the footsteps of its technological predecessors, which also saw their utility
threatened early on by unregulated, self-interested use. For example, amateur radio enthusiasts
filled the public airwaves with chatter in the early twentieth century, thus making them
unlistenable for the home audience, before governments finally stepped in to regulate the new
medium. The spam problem and its attempted resolution illustrates that it is not a
matter of whether governments will attempt to regulate and police the Internet, but of how and
how much they will do so.
CONCLUSIONS
People are not passively affected by technology, but actively shape its use and influence.The Internet has unique, even transformational qualities as a
communication channel, including relative anonymity and the ability to easily link with others
who have similar interests, values, and beliefs. Research has found that the relative anonymity
aspect encourages self-expression, and the relative absence of physical and nonverbal interaction
cues (e.g., attractiveness) facilitates the formation of relationships on other, deeper bases such as
shared values and beliefs. At the same time, however, these “limited bandwidth” features of
Internet communication also tend to leave a lot unsaid and unspecified, and open to inference
and interpretation. Not surprisingly, then, one’s own desires and goals regarding the people with
whom one interacts have been found to make a dramatic difference in the assumptions and
attributions one makes within that informational void.
Despite past media headlines to the contrary, the Internet does not make its users depressed or
lonely, and it does not seem to be a threat to community life---quite the opposite, in fact. If
anything, the Internet, mainly through e-mail, has facilitated communication and thus close ties
between family and friends, especially those too far away to visit in person on a regular basis.
The Internet can be fertile territory for the formation of new relationships as well, especially
those based on shared values and interests as opposed to attractiveness and physical appearance
as is the norm in the off-line world. And in any event, when these Internet-formed relationships get close enough (i.e., when sufficient trust has been
established), people tend to bring them into their “real world”---that is, the traditional face-toface
and telephone interaction sphere. This means nearly all of the typical person’s close friends
will be in touch with them in “real life”---on the phone or in person---and not so much over the
Internet, which gives the lie to the media stereotype of the Internet as drawing people away from
their “real-life” friends.
Still, the advent of the Internet is likely to produce dramatic changes in our daily lives. For
example, together with high-speed computing and encryption technology it already plays a
significant role in crime and terrorism by enabling private communication across any distance
without being detected. And we quite rightly have been warned that
repressive regimes may harness the Internet and all of the data banks that connect to it to
increase their power over the population. A step in this direction is the 2001 “Patriot Act,” (enacted in the United States following the September 11
attacks) which called for the technology to monitor the content of Internet traffic to be built into
the Internet’s very infrastructure. However, these important issues concerning the Internet lie
outside of our purview in this chapter.
We emphasize, in closing, one potentially great benefit of the Internet for social-psychological
research and theorizing: by providing a contrasting alternative to the usual face-to-face
interaction environment. As Lea & Spears (1995) and O’Sullivan (1996) have noted, studying
how relationships form and are maintained on the Internet brings into focus the implicit
assumptions and biases of our traditional (face-to- face) relationship and communication
research literatures (see Cathcart & Gumpert 1983)---most especially the assumptions that faceto-face interactions, physical proximity, and nonverbal communication are necessary and
essential to the processes of relating to each other effectively. By providing an alternative
interaction setting in which interactions and relationships play by somewhat different rules, and
have somewhat different outcomes, the Internet sheds light on those aspects of face-to-face
interaction that we may have missed all along. Tyler (2002), for example, reacting to the research
findings on Internet interaction, wonders whether it is the presence of physical features that
makes face-to-face interaction what it is, or is it instead the immediacy of responses (compared
to e-mail)? That’s a question we never knew to ask before.
Our review has revealed many cases and situations in which social interaction over the
Internet is preferred and leads to better outcomes than in traditional interaction venues, as well as
those in which it doesn’t. As the Internet becomes ever more a part of our daily lives, the trick
for us will be to know the difference. But it is reassuring that the evidence thus far shows people
to be adapting pretty well to the brave new wired (and soon to be wireless) social world.