While e-mail may promote a sort of contact with friends and family, that virtual contact may be more superficial than that which occurs in more personal settings. Interpersonal communications have a purpose far different from the instant, asynchronous control and coordination purposes of e-mail in the business world. Face-to-face and even telephone communication among friends, family, and colleagues, are as much about affect as information. Although empathy, tenderness, reassurance, flirtation, sadness or happiness can be written into e-mail messages, e-mail misses the eye contact, body language, facial expressions, vocalization, hugs, tears, embraces, and giggles that are the fundamentals of our socio-emotional evolution. E-mail thus appears to imply an obvious tradeoff between quantity and quality of social interaction. Similarly, even the most gratifying telephone calls cannot replace a personal visit. To be sure, writing letters, too, is an activity between self and mind, all the while imagining the recipient and his or her reactions. E-mail, in this regard, is more like letter writing, as we have understood it through the ages but in a more casual mode, with less emotional involvement or exposure.
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Conclusion
We find that the results from our recent time diary survey offer strong support for the hydraulic or displacement hypothesis and no evidence to support the efficiency hypothesis. On average, the more time spent on the Internet, the less time spent with friends, family, and colleagues. Alternatively, the more time spent on the Internet, the more time spent alone. Even more compelling, perhaps, are our findings regarding location of Internet use. Internet use at home has a strong negative impact on time spent with friends and family, while Internet use at work is strongly related to decreased time with colleagues (but has little effect on social time with friends and family). Similarly, Internet use during the weekends is more strongly related to decreased time spent with friends and family than Internet use during weekdays, for it is during these hours evenings and weekendswhen time on Internet and e-mail competes most directly with
time spent in face to face interactions with others. And while email undeniably brings some social benefits, time on the Internete-mail or otherwiseis fundamentally time spent alone.
It is always difficult in an empirical work, primarily designed to test competing hypotheses, to stand back and rise above the specific findings to consider the larger social implications. The concerns we raised in this chapter, and with the original SIQSS study about the potential social consequences of the Internet in reducing the density and heterogeneity of face-to- face social relationships, were not predicated on the Internet as a
single social invention, but rather, as part of on ongoing sociological trend. Much of the social history of the 19th and 20th century is a story about the dissolution of community and family connections the social support networks that linked individuals to one another and to their communities. It is a central theme among those who study modernity. Moreover, much of this decline in face-to- face social connectedness has arisen from one
technological change after another. The mobility made possible by the railroad and automobile also made possible sub- urbanization and the atomistic bedroom community. Likewise, airplanes, highway systems, and the telephone made it feasible for the modern corporation to exist in many places at once, and, consequently, made it necessary to move its managers(if not its workforce) from one city or count ry to another. In stark contrast with just a generation or two ago, it is common for people to be born and raised in one community but live their adult lives in another (or a series of several others). All of these innovations have had unintended negative effects on lifelong family, extended family, and friendship ties. Siblings, parents, children, aunts, cousins, grade school and high school friends are no longer present daily, and they no longer form the lifelong support and friendship groups they once did.
To be clearwe are not offering a doomsday warning about any immediate threat of extinction of face-to- face interpersonal relationships. Rather, we want to emphasize that Internet usewhatever its possible benefits to virtual communitiesinvolves a time tradeoff in which time on the Internet at home and (to a lesser extent) at work displaces face-to-face social interactions. We do believe that it is particularly important to be
conscious and aware of this tradeoff because Internet use in American society continues to grow as bandwidths and connection speeds increase. Moreover, in a world of DSL and beyond, increasing commuting times, and ever more expensive office space, workers may increasingly be telecommuting from homeand yet another rich source of human
interactions will have slipped away. Coupled with the fact that single member households are the fastest growing type of American household, it seems possible that a growing portion of the population may soon live as well as work alone. Within such a context, the unintended social consequences of the Internet become more pervasive. The human psyche evolved under a much richer and enduring social world kith, kin, and community were both daily and enduring interactions of life. The Internet is not, by any means, itself responsible for the transformation to a world in which people spend more of their waking hours alone than with others. But, the Internet follows a long string of technological innovations that each have had the unintended consequence of reducing the number and meaningfulness of emotionally gratifying face-to-face human interactions.
