In short, ''the more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings,'' said Norman Nie, a political scientist at Stanford University who was the principal investigator for the study.
Mr. Nie asserted that the Internet was creating a broad new wave of social isolation in the United States, raising the specter of an atomized world without human contact or emotion....
In the past Mr. Nie has been the author of studies on the decline of American involvement in political and community organizations. He said that while much of the public Internet debate had been focused on the invasion of privacy, little study had been done of the potential psychological and emotional impact of what he said would be more people ''home, alone and anonymous.''
Mr. Nie, a co-author of the study with Prof. Lutz Erbring of the Free University of Berlin, contended that there was no evidence that virtual communities would provide a substitute for traditional human relationships....
In August 1998 researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reported that people who spent even a few hours a week connected to the Internet experienced higher levels of depression and loneliness.
In contrast to the Carnegie Mellon study, which focused on psychological and emotional issues, the Stanford survey is an effort to provide a broad demographic picture of Internet use and its potential impact on society.
''No one is asking the obvious questions about what kind of world we are going to live in when the Internet becomes ubiquitous,'' Mr. Nie said.
''No one asked these questions with the advent of the automobile, which led to unplanned suburbanization, or with the rise of television, which led to the decline of our political parties.''
''We hope we can give society a chance to talk through some of these issues before the changes take place,'' he said....
''There are going to be millions of people with very minimal human interaction,'' he said. ''We're really in for some things that are potentially great freedoms but frightening in terms of long-term social interaction.''
...The internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it."
Email is like a slot machine:
...works on a principle of variable reinforcement schedule, which Tom Stafford, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, explained has been established as the way to train the strongest habits. "This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, , usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful-an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip-and I get a reward."
..."When we log in to our email server," writes Richard DeGrandpre in Digitopia, "the expectation of finding new mail negates any possible excitement or surprise; if there's no new mail, we're disappointed," So we check it more and more. As the condition progresses, sufferers feel increasingly isolated from society, become argumentative, and fall into depression... Early sufferers, Block says, tended to be highly educated, socially awkward men, but now more and more they are middle-aged women who are either at home alone or wokring."
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Memory:
A group of twentysomethings were asked to sort a deck of cards-once in silence, a second time while listening to randomly selected sounds in search of specific tones. "The subjects' brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus-which stores and recalls information-to the striatum," Kirn explained, "which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction-but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they'd been sorting once the experiment was over."
I multitask and I don't remember very well. The reason why people don't remember as well when they get older is that they're multitasking much more so. The multitasking they're doing is constantly remembering the farther past, thus not focusing on the present so much. It's necessary to do this to some extent. If you didn't, if the past is never remembered, what point was there in living it?
