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

// ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Sun Mar 27 11:19:00 PDT 2011


On Mar 27, 2011, at 2:50 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
> 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
>> <snip happens>
>
>> ...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?
>

Yes. A recent unrelated example I read was Amartya Sen’s attempt at overcoming Jeremy Bentham’s criticism of the idea of natural rights (“nonsense on stilts”).


> 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.

I am not inspired to read the rest of the paper, but a comment anyway: I do think (and I have said this before) that any sort of technological communication always falls well short of face-to-face interaction for me (the technological variety does bring some advantages, e.g: writing letters helps collect and organise thoughts leading to an edifying exchange, digital communication enables easier and better sharing of some material like photographs).

Of course nobody on LBO wants to meet for dinner with me (thus far!) :-). Might work better if I announce a date/time/place?

—ravi



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