The Social Net
Scientists
hope to download some insight into online interactions
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 cyberthought 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: http://www.sciencenews.org/20000226/fob8.asp).
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.
He finds this trend particularly troubling in
light of evidence that community involvement in the United States had
already fallen substantially by the time the Internet debuted. In Bowling
Alone (2000, Touchstone), Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam
makes the case for a nationwide civic retreat over the past 30 years.
Perhaps the most exhaustive attempt to see whether
people tend to end up computing alone occurred in England. University of
Essex sociologist Jonathan Gershuny directed a study of 1,000 randomly
chosen households in which adults kept a diary of their own and their kids'
daily activities over the same 1-week period in 1999, 2000, and 2001.
Internet users, who made up nearly half the sample
by 2001, generally engaged in as much social activity as nonusers, Gershuny
says. Moreover, those who first went online after entering the study showed
big boosts in the amount of time allotted to sociable leisure activities,
such as going to movies and eating at restaurants.
The results don't establish that Internet use
makes people more social than they were to begin with. Gershuny suspects,
however, that online access to friends, theaters, group discussions in
so-called chat rooms, and so on makes it easier to arrange social
get-togethers of all sorts.
"In short, the Internet makes going out more
efficient," he says. "And so, we might be tempted to do more of
it."
The rich get richer
Disturbing signs that the Internet fosters
loneliness and depression first emerged in a study of more than 200
individuals in 93 Pittsburgh households given online access in 1995 and
1996 (SN: 9/12/98, p. 168). Up to 3 years later, however, the heaviest
Internet users in these households reported being happiest and having the
most social contacts, concludes Kraut's team in the spring Journal of
Social Issues.
From 1995 to 1998, the Internet's rapid spread may
have made the online world "a more hospitable place," the
researchers propose. Moreover, given long-term Internet access, adults and
teens who had extraverted personalities showed most of the gains in social
life, community involvement, and personal well-being. Introverts gravitated
away from social contacts and felt more alone after 2 to 3 years online.
"You're more likely to use the Internet to
expand your social world if you're already a social person, but not if
you're introverted," Kraut asserts. His team calls this
personality-based process the "rich get richer" model of Internet
use.
In a related finding in the same households, the
scientists find that women use e-mail far more than men do to maintain
family relationships and to keep in touch with friends who live far away.
Previous research had shown that women generally take more interest than
men do in cultivating relationships in person and on the telephone.
The intensity of instant messaging—in which
correspondents immediately see and respond to each other's e-mails—may
particularly appeal to women, Kraut theorizes. He plans to examine this
possibility in further research.
Still, gregarious folk may not be the only ones
reaping online social capital, argues psychologist Katelyn Y.A. McKenna of
New York University. Internet communication encourages individuals to
disclose personal traits that are difficult to reveal in person, especially
to a new acquaintance, McKenna and her colleagues report in the spring Journal
of Social Issues. Friendships form especially quickly among the people
who offer such personal revelations online, even if they're anxious and
depressed, the researchers contend.
McKenna's group first randomly surveyed 568 men
and women who posted messages on any of 20 Internet newsgroups, sites where
people discuss politics or some other common interest. A majority had formed
online friendships that had progressed to telephone conversations and
personal meetings. Members of both sexes who said they could disclose their
self-described "true" selves on the Internet better than in other
social situations formed the bulk of these friendships, which typically had
lasted for at least 2 years.
For instance, a relatively reserved man who is
best able to reveal his "sensitive side" with people he meets
online stands a good chance of making friends in a newsgroup, McKenna says.
In initial encounters among college students, the
Internet's anonymity and absence of cues about physical appearance promoted
self-disclosure and a tendency for partners to think more highly of one
another than they did after meeting in person, she adds.
Groups and loops
It's no secret that communication sometimes turns
nasty online. The act of electronically denigrating a person even has its
own name—flaming.
Internet-based negotiations of various kinds
provide fertile ground for communication breakdowns, according to Leigh
Thompson and Janice Nadler, both psychologists at Northwestern University
in Evanston, Ill. Over the past 5 years, the researchers have studied pairs
of business students—neither of whom knew the other—randomly assigned to be
either a buyer or a seller in an experimental negotiation. This task, working
out details of the purchase of a company's cars, was conducted over about a
week via either e-mail or personal meetings.
E-mail negotiations often dissolved in
disagreement and acrimony, whereas in-person negotiations more frequently
yielded mutual accords, the researchers note. E-mail negotiators routinely
got frustrated with what they perceived as inappropriate delays in
responses to their questions and proposals. They then became unwilling to
take turns in sending and receiving messages, a breach of etiquette that
doomed the negotiations. In these anonymous encounters, negotiators tended
to issue ultimatums, favor intimidation over cooperation, and attribute
sinister motives to their partners, the Northwestern scientists say.
In their studies, the most successful e-mail
negotiators first engaged in pleasant small talk before hammering out
agreements.
In contrast, people who already know one another
often work quite well online, contends psychologist Russell Spears of the
University of Amsterdam. Spears and his coworkers have studied Internet
chat rooms organized by college students to discuss course material and to
work on projects. These groups rapidly developed distinctive rules of
communication etiquette. Each group's members increasingly conformed to
these guidelines over time.
Moreover, many messages that at first looked to
the researchers like instances of flaming turned out to be humorous
put-downs that reflected warm feelings within a tight-knit group, Spears
says.
It may also be possible to inject a warmer social
atmosphere directly into the Internet's architecture. Scientists at IBM's
T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have designed a pair
of software systems that use simple visual cues to convey social
information to participants in online corporate work groups.
"These systems support conversations and
promote a sense of group trust," says psychologist Wendy Kellogg, who
directs the project.
The first system, called Babble, displays a window
in which dots within a circle denote who is in a current group
conversation. The proximity of dots to the circle's center indicates how
recently each person has entered the discussion. In an adjoining window,
users create and prioritize a list of discussion topics.
Babble also provides a text of current and past
discussions on each topic. Users immediately know whether remarks have been
separated by seconds, minutes, days, or months.
Over the past 4 years, about two dozen groups
within IBM have used Babble, often to organize collaborative efforts that
lasted a month or more. Most groups liked the intimate atmosphere fostered
by the system and employed it successfully, Kellogg says.
A second system, called Loops, is now being tested
at IBM. Loops runs on the World Wide Web and expands on Babble's format.
For instance, Kellogg says it provides cues to the physical location of
conversation members and includes an area for inserting informational
"Post-its," such as Web sites to share with others. Systems such
as Loops may prove to be a boon for the growing number of business teams
with members dispersed around the globe, she adds.
The dark side
Authoritarian governments regard the Internet as a
two-sided technology that offers tempting economic opportunities while
raising daunting political dangers. For instance, Chinese officials have
aggressively pushed for expansion of information technologies in business.
At the same time, they have exerted strict controls over prodemocracy
groups' e-mail communications and blocked access of all Chinese Internet
users to Web sites deemed politically unacceptable.
Chinese dissident groups have increasingly found
ways to evade government Internet restrictions, such as linking their
computers to foreign Internet hubs, which can then reconnect users to banned
Web sites, says University of Toronto political scientist Ronald J.
Deibert. China's dispersed masses pose a tough challenge to Internet
regulators, he proposes.
The Internet troubles democratic governments
because it provides an unprecedented forum for hate groups and terrorists.
In the February American Behavioral Scientist, John J. Stanton of
the National Defense Industrial Association in Arlington, Va., surveyed the
growing number of sophisticated Web sites run by such groups to organize
activities and recruit new members. Their causes range from enforcing
separation of racial groups to destroying the property of companies deemed
to be exploiting the environment.
Some researchers hope to use the Internet to
explore the largely hidden world of such groups. For instance, psychologist
Jack Glaser of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues
posed as curious, naive visitors to ask 38 participants in several white
supremacist chat rooms about their ideas on biracial marriage and other racial
issues.
Glaser considers this technique ethical because
participants were contacted in a public forum, weren't coerced, addressed
common topics of conversation in their chat rooms, and were not personally
identified by the researchers. Surreptitious interviewing might also yield
new insights into such denizens of the Internet as child pornographers and
illegal weapons traders, Glaser says.
However, deceiving people on the Internet in the
name of science "is ethically on the edge," remarks New York University
psychologist John A. Bargh. No ethical guidelines for conducting online
research currently exist, he notes.
It's just one more unsettled issue in the hazy
realm of the social Net.
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