Untangling the Social Impact of the Internet: A Large-Scale Survey

This paper examines the Internet’s impact on social relationships: the number of face-to-face friends, hours socializing face-to-face with household members, and the number of name-identifiable neighbors. Data were collected in the year 2000 by telephone interview with 2,096 U.S. households. The findings suggest that the Internet’s effects are too heterogeneous to be captured by a simple model. Any analyses with a simplified model will lead to erroneous conclusions with heterogeneous effects canceling each other out. The findings also suggest that Internet use attenuates the effects of individual demographic characteristics. This implies that social relationships become more equal in the face of the Internet. We speculate that technology, giving equal opportunity to any type of people, contributes to this attenuation.