Net use
survey slammed as 'non-science'
02/21/00- Updated 05:26 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A new study
that finds increased Internet use causes decreased
face-to-face social interaction is being roundly
criticized by detractors as non-science.
"Presenting it as a scientific
study is a bit of a reach. It's preliminary work and
it doesn't tell us much,'' said Howard Fienberg, a
research analyst with the Statistical Assessment
Service in Washington, D.C.
The study was released Wednesday by
researchers at the Institute for the Quantitative
Study of Society.
It surveyed 4,113 American adults in
2,689 households. Respondents were provided with free
Internet access and WebTV connections to facilitate
the survey.
The study found that too much time
on the Internet makes some people reclusive and less
likely to interact with people face to face.
''The Internet could be the ultimate
isolating technology that further reduces our
participation in communities even more than television
did before it,'' said Norman Nie, a Stanford political
scientist who conducted the study of the Net's impact
on society with Professor Lutz Erbring of the Free
University of Berlin.
About one-third of respondents said
they were online five or more hours per week. Of those
people, 13% said they spent less time with family and
friends, 26% talked less to family and friends on the
phone, and 8% attended fewer social events.
The study also found that most
surfers use e-mail and have increased their online
conversations with family and friends.
Fienberg suggested a more random
selection of survey respondents studied over a longer
period of time would produce more accurate indicators
of Internet use and social effects.
The study prompted author and
Internet use expert Jakob Nielsen to question its
designers' definitions of human contact.
Nielsen said the definition should
include Internet-based environments such as chat
rooms, message boards and e-mail. Nielsen said
concepts of contact used in the study were
ill-defined.
''How do you define what you count
as personal contact?'' Nielsen asked. ''You could have
had some other report a hundred years ago that said
the telephone would cause a loss in social relations
and human contact. The big problem is that the
definitions do not hold in the new human experience.''
In addition to scaling back personal
contact, the study showed that a quarter of regular
Internet users who are employed increased the time
they spent working at home.
Sixty percent of those same regular
Internet users also said they watched less television
and one third said they spent less time reading
newspapers.
The survey's work was done by
InterSurvey, a Menlo Park company which Nie
co-founded.
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