[lbo-talk] "Internet Use, Interpersonal Relations, and Sociability: A Time Diary Study"

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Mar 26 23:50:58 PDT 2011


On Sat, 26 Mar 2011, SA cited


> Nie, N. H., Hillygus, D. S. and Erbring, L. (2008) "Internet Use,
> Interpersonal Relations, and Sociability: A Time Diary Study" in The
> Internet in Everyday Life (eds B. Wellman and C. Haythornthwaite),
> Blackwell Publishers
>
> ABSTRACT:
>
> Using exciting new time diary data

Now there's an oxymoron :-)


> ...Rather than dwelling on the increasingly stale debate about whether
> the Internet is good or bad for sociability...Our findings offer support
> for a "displacement" or "hydraulic" theory of Internet use -- time
> online is largely an asocial activity that competes with, rather than
> complements, face-to-face social time

That sort of sounds like the stale debate, no?

Is this post asocial? If I spend an hour doing stuff like this, am I really not interacting with friends? I'll buy that it's a different form of social interaction. But not that it's the defining opposite of social.

So this seems like a dead end framework. But perhaps the abstract isn't a fair representation of the full paper.

Michael



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