A new member in the family
The Internet is a member of our family. According to my monthly bill, each of us spent about 5.4 hours a week online, which makes us pretty much average American Net users. I cannot speak for the rest of my family, but I relish my online time. Now new study tells me that I should feel bad about it. Bourbon, red meat, whole milk and the Internet, too?
According to the study, “the Web makes us even lonelier and more isolated than we already are. The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings. There is a danger of increasing social isolation and creating a deadened and atomized world without human emotion.”
Could that be possible? Did I miss fighting the shopping mall crowds this Christmas to buy one of my sons a hat he had really wanted? Not at all. I spent 15 minutes online instead of two hours –minimum- searching for parking, then trudging from store to store to have indifferent young clerks shrug their shoulders and mutter, "No problem”. That is not a human contact I crave. Online in the last couple of weeks, I've kept in touch with busy friends, some of whom live halfway around the world, and tracked temperatures in Seville, Spain, which we are visiting next month. I've easily located and purchased out-of-print books from small secondhand dealers and looked up some useful exercises for a knee I had hurt.Each of these little solitary outings made me shamefully happy.
The other night, my 14-year-old son was ecstatic because he had finally gotten access to the chat room his school friends visit. It would be better if all his friends lived on the same block so they could all hang out together in person. But connecting on-line may be the best alternative.
People already spend a lot of time alone, even when they are with their families. I've heard many parents with multiple televisions in their homes talk about how everyone scatters after supper to watch a separate program.
According to the study , of the people who are online five or more hours a week - about 20 percent of those surveyed - 59 percent are spending less time watching television. Is that making life worse? Online, some of the conversations are two-way.
Of course, there are concerns. I recently told my 14-year-old that he couldn't put his computer in his bedroom and had to keep it in the family room. I wanted to keep an eye on what he was downloading, nag him when he was spending too much time online and pat his head occasionally. Yes, we all need to monitor this powerful tool.
But the problem is not the Internet. The suburbs and the long automobile commutes to our workplaces have fragmented our lives and perhaps left us too far apart. We need to turn some attention to helping people find pleasurable ways to get back together and helping them make time to do it.
To prosper emotionally, people need to feel wanted, needed and valued. Our failure to offer this prospect to many citizens long predates the World Wide Web. And making sensational and premature proclamations about the Internet's harm simply distracts us from addressing those social conditions that drive us apart. Let's not go for the virtual damage when the real thing is before us.
Adapted from an article by Janna Malamud Smith, in The New York Times February 18, 2000