Christian Cárdenas, Sara Jasper, Kristen Parton, Jed Rose and Luke Swartz
"The brave new world of cyber-glop will be an increasingly lonely, isolated and dehumanized word. It will be a place where you can order anything you want online, but you don’t know your neighbors, where your children and your parents will spend evening hours logged into the Net, talking to distant strangers rather than each other."
-Clifford Stoll, author of "Silicon Valley Snake Oil"
ecent
studies by Stanford's SIQSS and Carnegie Mellon's
HomeNet Project have shown that increased use of the Internet leads to social isolation and
depression. People who spent more time on the Internet spent less time socializing
with peers, communicated less within the family and felt more lonely and depressed.
However, other studies emerged
contradicting these results, suggesting that the Internet actually brings
people closer together by bridging geographical barriers. We examine these studies
in depth, including the criticism they have recieved from the media. In order
to understand what contributes to Internet isolation, we look in-depth at how
social tools such as email, online
communities and Internet usage can bring people together virtually, but
may also result in isolating them physically.
To make our research more meaningful and applicable to the Stanford community,
we conducted our own survey of an
accidental sampling of Stanford undergraduates, focusing on the various ways
students use the Internet and how it affects their social lives, relationships
and communication with friends and family. As Jakob Nielsen observed, Internet
use is predominantly correlated with age and level of education. Stanford undergraduates
represent a concentrated population of highly educated young people, a group
with much greater exposure to the Internet than the average person addressed
by previous studies. By comparing our survey findings to those of previous studies,
we draw conclusions about the way the Internet impacts the personal lives of
people living in an Internet-integrated society, a goal which America seems
to be rapidly approaching.
This site begins by examining the debate over isolation and connectedness on the Internet, followed by an in-depth look at studies of Internet isolation. Finally, we present our own study and its results, and our overall conclusions.
This web site is our final project for our Computers, Ethics, And Social Responsibility class in the Computer Science department at Stanford University.