the internet and social life.pdf

Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2004. 55:573–90

doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.141922

First published online as a Review in Advance on July 11, 2003

T HE I NTERNET AND S OCIAL L IFE

John A. Bargh and Katelyn Y. A. McKenna

New York University, New York, New York 10003; email: john.bargh@nyu.edu,

kym1@nyu.edu

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 his-

torical context, and then examine the effects of Internet use on the user’s psychological

well-being, the formation and maintenance of personal relationships, group member-

ships and social identity, the workplace, and community involvement. The evidence

suggests that while these effects are largely dependent on the particular goals that users

bring to the interaction—such as self-expression, afﬁliation, or competition—they also

interact in important ways with the unique qualities of the Internet communication

situation.

CONTENTS

578

Personal (Close) Relationships ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 580

Group Membership and Social Support :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 582

Community Involvement :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 584

THE MODERATING ROLE OF TRUST ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 585

CONCLUSIONS :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 586

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

INTRODUCTION

It is interactive: Like the telephone and the telegraph (and unlike radio or tele-

vision), 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. It has been viliﬁed as a powerful new tool for the devil, awash in

0066-4308/04/0204-0573$14.00

573

Key Words communication, groups, relationships, depression, loneliness

INTRODUCTION ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 573

THE INTERNET IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 575

EFFECTS ON INTERPERSONAL INTERACTION :::::::::::::::::::::::::: 577

In the Workplace

574

BARGH ¥ MCKENNA

pornography, causing users to be addicted to hours each day of “surﬁng”—hours

during which they are away from their family and friends, resulting in depres-

sion and loneliness for the individual user, and further weakening neighborhood

and community ties. It has been hailed by two U.S. presidents as the ultimate

weapon in the battle against totalitarianism and tyranny, and credited by Federal

Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan with creating a “new economy.” It was

denounced by the head of the Miss France committee as “an uncontrolled medium

where rumormongers, pedophiles, prostitutes, and criminals could go about their

business with impunity” after it facilitated the worldwide spread of rumors that

the reigning Miss France was, in fact, a man (Reuters 2001). “I’m terriﬁed by this

type of media,” she said.

“It,” of course, is the Internet. 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.” (Manasian

2003, p. 4)

:::

The Internet is fast becoming a natural, background part of everyday life. In

2002, more than 600 million people worldwide had access to it (Manasian 2003).

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 (Turow & Kavanaugh

2003). In California, 13-year-olds use their home computer as essentially another

telephone to chat and exchange “instant messages” with their school friends (Gross

et al. 2002). Toronto suburbanites use it as another means of contacting friends and

family, especially when distance makes in-person and telephone communication

difﬁcult (Hampton & Wellman 2001). 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.

This is not to say that Internet technology has now penetrated the entire planet

to a similar extent. For example, in 2001 only 1 in 250 people in Africa was an

Internet user, compared with a world average of 1 in 35, and 1 in 3 for North Amer-

ica and Europe. But the trend is clearly for ever-greater availability: The coming

wireless technology (see Geer 2000, p. 11) will enable people in developing coun-

tries, who lag behind the rest of the world in hardwired infrastructure, to leapfrog

technological stages and so come on-line much sooner than they would other-

wise have been able to—much as eastern Europe in the 1990s, lacking extensive

“

INTERNET AND SOCIAL LIFE

575

hardwire telephone infrastructure, leapfrogged directly to cell phones (Markoff

2002, Economist 2003a).

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 (Hampton & Wellman 2001, Howard

et al. 2001, McKenna & Bargh 2000, Stafford et al. 1999). As Kang (2000,

p. 1150) put it, “the ‘killer application’ of the internet turns out to be other human

beings.” But this was not so obvious to the early investors in the Internet—in

the 1990s telecom companies invested (and lost) billions of dollars in interactive

television and in delivering movies and video over the Internet. (Interestingly, the

original supposed “killer app” of the telephone also was to broadcast content such

as music, news, and stock prices—and its use in this manner persisted in Europe

up to World War II.)

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 em-

phasized this negative view (see McKenna & Bargh 2000) to the point that, as a

result, a substantial minority of (mainly older) adults refuses to use the Internet

at all (Hafner 2003). Others believe that the Internet affords a new and different

avenue of social interaction that enables groups and relationships to form that oth-

erwise 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 re-

cently the Internet—was met with concerns about its potential to weaken commu-

nity ties (Katz et al. 2001, p. 406). The telegraph , by eliminating physical distance

as an obstacle to communication between individuals, had a profound effect on

life in the nineteenth century (Standage 1998). 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

576

BARGH ¥ MCKENNA

London to New York could be sent and received in just minutes (Spar 2001,

p. 60), 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” (Standage 1998,

pp. 82–83). 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” (Spar 2001,

p. 31). 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 (Standage

1998, pp. 129–142). And today, worldwide, people send each other more than a

billion text messages each day from their mobile phones ( Economist 2003b), 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 (Matei & Ball-Rokeach 2001). 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?” (Fischer 1992).

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” (Spar 2001, p. 7). Eventually, however, radio brought the

world into everyone’s living room and so eliminated distance as a factor in news

INTERNET AND SOCIAL LIFE

577

dissemination like never before. And indeed, it did soon prove to be a powerful

propaganda tool for dictators and democratically elected leaders alike.

But television had the greatest actual (as opposed to feared) impact on com-

munity 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.

Sociologist Robert Putnam (2000) has documented the dramatic decrease in com-

munity involvement (such as memberships in fraternal organizations and bowling

leagues) since the introduction of television in the 1950s (see also DiMaggio et al.

2001). This negative effect of television viewing on the individual’s degree of

involvement in other, especially community, activities has been the basis for con-

temporary worries that Internet use might displace time formerly spent with family

and friends (e.g., Nie & Erbring 2000).

The Internet combines, for the ﬁrst time in history, many of these breakthrough

features in a single communication medium. Like the telegraph and telephone,

it can be used for person-to-person communication (e.g., e-mail, text messages);

like radio and television, it can operate as a mass medium. And it can serve as a

fabulous global library as well—fully 73% of American college students now use

the Internet more than their university library for researching term papers (Jones

2002). As DiMaggio et al. (2001, p. 327) note, the variety of functions that the

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 differ-

ences especially have been the focus of most psychological and human-computer

interaction research on the Internet. First, it is possible to be relatively anony-

mous 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 non-

verbal 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 computer-based 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

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: