Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction

Citation

Parry, F. (2003), "Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 215-216. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310481508

Social Consequences of Internet Use, or the First National Random Study of the Internet’s Social Consequences as the preface puts it, is made up of the analysis of comparative national survey data of three major areas of Internet use: access, civic and community involvement, social interaction and expression. These are all areas where the debates on the effects of the Internet have been most intense.

Katz and Rice have based their work around their own major surveys of 1995 and 1997 and the Pew Internet and American Life Project of 2000. Other surveys and work in the area are also referenced. The authors have called their work the Syntopia Project, “syntopia” being a neologism describing “the synergy across media and between mediated and unmediated activities”.

The opening, scene‐setting chapter on American life and the Internet sets a pattern for the rest of the book. First, we have the dystopian view which says that access will be characterised by an increasing digital divide, that virtual communities and politics will have an adverse effect on traditional real‐life encounters or that the individual will be isolated in cyberspace. Second, we have the utopian view which counters the first and advances the claims of a beneficent, life‐enhancing Internet. And third, we have the authors’ syntopian, evidence‐based conclusions derived from their own and other surveys. In some cases, such as access, the authors’ view is simply a synthesis of the opposing dystopian and utopian camps. In others, they flatly contradict established opinion. For instance, by using multivariate analysis the authors conclude that the Internet produces more, not less, social interaction, contradicting several other studies. Elsewhere, they claim that there is compelling “evidence of the socially grounded nature of identity building and interaction in cyberspace”, thus also confounding the generally‐held view that the Internet can be a place “in which a physically locatable individual can be abandoned”. In each case the authors’ claims are derived from – and backed up by – the information in the many tables of survey data. The chapter on access and the digital divide, for instance, has 14 tables of survey data alone.

There are also some surprising conclusions. There is a chapter on the phenomena of Internet drop‐outs, or loggers‐off, which has not been widely studied elsewhere. The logging‐off survey is accompanied by detailed tables related to age, race, gender and income groups of loggers‐off.

In addition to the abundance of information from the surveys, the authors are to be commended for the extensive referencing of Internet sites and a very full bibliography. There were times, however, when I felt swamped by the sheer volume of facts and figures on any given topic and found myself skipping the data and concentrating on the conclusions.

That said, Katz and Rice have produced an impressively well‐researched work which will no doubt fuel further studies in this area. It is a thoroughly detailed study of the social implications of the Internet in America.

For researchers outside the USA, the surveys and data from which they are based will probably mean that much of this work will have to be used in conjunction with surveys in their own countries. The issues are nonetheless recognisable worldwide, and the conclusions are noteworthy and thought provoking.

Some readers – myself included – may find the statistical material in the survey results chapter daunting and just a little too relentless. They, too, will still find much to interest them, however, in the other chapters detailing survey conclusions and the general observations of the social impact of the Internet. All in all, this is a useful addition to any collection on Internet research.