Gauging Net's impact on society
GazetteNet Business 2000
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Four of the children in the Larson-Nadeau household in Shutesbury use the three computers set up in the family's living room. From left are Sarah, Alex, Carrie, mother Peg Larson, Emily, and father Bill Nadeau who try to foster togetherness by gathering the computers in a shared space.
JERREY ROBERTS photo |
Monday, February 28, 2000
By SUZANNE WILSON, Staff Writer
We know it's huge. We know it's historic. But damned if we have any idea whether it's good or bad.
The "it" is the Internet's impact on American life.
"It's a revolution like we've never seen before," says Leslie Ball, associate dean of the School of Management at the University of Massachusetts.
"I'd put it right up there with fire and the printing press," says Robin Raskin, editor in chief of FamilyPC magazine in New York.
Because the Internet is still in its infancy, we are only just beginning to grapple with its impact on our lives, say those who have followed its rapid development.
Some of those changes are clearly national in scope. Like the steam engine before it, says Ball, the Internet is profoundly changing the economy, in this case moving the country from an industrial o to an information-based economy.
But its effect on our day to day lives, he adds, will be equally dramatic. Very soon, Ball says, the image most of us conjure up when we think of someone using the Internet o an individual sitting at a screen and keyboard alone in a den or office o will be hopelessly antiquated. By next year, to cite just one example, some cars will feature voice-activated e-mail capability, allowing drivers to listen to and respond to messages as they tool along the highway.
Already, says Raskin, the Internet has brought many families closer through e-mail. But it has also blurred the lines between work and home. Home is no longer necessarily a place apart, a refuge, but a place where you can make purchases, trade stocks, and write up the memo you didn't get to at work.
The challenge for families, she says, increasingly will be to know when enough is enough, to know when it's time "to shut it all off."
Instant access
Shutting it off may sound appealing, but the louder message these days seems to be just the opposite: let it in.
In an ad now running on television, we see Dad, dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe, padding into the kitchen in the late night darkness. The computer beckons. He walks over to the counter and clicks on. In an instant, he checks out the game score and heads back upstairs to bed.
The point is to sell the benefits of around the clock, instant access to the Web.
But as the Internet steadily seeps into more American homes - about 40 percent of households are now on-line, and that figure may double by 2004, according to one congressional study - we're hearing more about this encroaching technology's downside.
Earlier this month, a widely publicized and highly controversial study out of Stanford University concluded that the more time people spend on the Internet, the less time they spend with family and friends. The heaviest Internet users also reported spending less time shopping, less time reading newspapers and watching television, and more time working at home.
The study's author, Norman Nie, was quoted describing his worries about his findings this way: "When you spend your time on the Internet, you don't hear a human voice and you never get a hug."
But not everyone was swayed by the study's thesis that use of the Internet is potentially creating lonelier people and more fragmented families.
Joseph Kayany, a communication professor at Western Michigan University who was contacted with the aid of a query sent over the Internet, says his research suggests otherwise.
"All families are not the same," said Kayany, who studied about 70 families in his area. Use of home computers and Internet access had no negative impact in families where open discussion and close communication were the norm, Kayany found. In fact, those families tended to use the Internet to bolster family ties with far-flung relatives by e-mail. In more closed families, he found more people tended to use the Internet "as a way to escape, to flee the domestic space."
And so, to get back to that ad, it's not clear whether we should worry that Dad is isolating himself from Mom and the kids. Or just checking the score.
Making connections
There are, to be sure, plenty of Internet users who don't see themselves in the rather grim, hug-deprived picture painted by the Stanford study.
"In our family, I think it goes the other way," says Peg Larson of Shutesbury.
Larson, 41, runs Wintergreen Associates, a business designing commercial Web sites from her home, where she lives with her husband, Bill Nadeau. There are six children in the family, ages 18 to 5. "They're all Internet wizards," says Larson. "I've inundated them with technology."
Three computers occupy a corner of the family living room. "That way you can see what the kids are doing," says Larson. Keeping computers out of the bedrooms and in a shared space, she adds, also means her family members, far from sitting in silent isolation, talk to each other frequently as they use the machines.
And use them they do. Emily, 9, used it to search for a toy she wanted for Christmas that her mother was able to buy at Media Play. Larson's 7-year-old has discovered Barbie.com. The 9- and 11-year-olds send messages to their school friends. The older children research homework assignments.
None of those activities, in Larson's view, has made her family any less close or communicative than it used to be.
"I think the problems are over-hyped," she says, but adds the caveat that parents should monitor how their children are using the Internet o something she realizes is a problem for many technologically-challenged adults.
Adults who do master the new technology, however, often find it a boon to their family connections. When his children studied abroad during college, Leslie Ball says the regular e-mails he exchanged with them were an invaluable addition to letters and phone calls. Via e-mail, for example, he kept his son abreast of the Red Sox season almost daily. Because of the immediacy of the exchange, he recalls, "I didn't feel a sense that they were that far away."
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Victoria White, the owner of eclecTechs™ in Northampton, believes that one of the best uses of the Internet is the swift exchange of electronic mail.
KEVIN GUTTIN photo |
When her mother, Julie Hill Alger, was living at an Amherst nursing home and battling breast cancer, Victoria White gave her a laptop computer. Alger began using it to write poetry, and to keep in touch with people every day. In that case, White, owner of eclecTechs™ in Northampton, says the Internet "did what it does best," by freeing her mother from her physical and geographical limitations.
"That experience shaped a lot of what I feel about this," she says. "I'm of the opinion that electronic mail is the best application of the Internet," she says - and certainly, she argues, a far more personal and positive experience than watching television.
On-line research
Valle Dwight, a freelance writer who lives in Northampton, says the Internet's effect on her family has been nothing but positive. As the mother of a child with Down syndrome, Dwight has gone on-line to research medical and educational issues, and to correspond with a doctor in Texas who has worked extensively with patients with Down syndrome.
Dwight has also exchanged e-mail with other parents of children with special needs, some of whom she eventually met in person at a conference.
"I was nervous about it," she recalls, realizing that real-life contact would bring a whole new dimension to those relationships. Her apprehension, though, quickly passed. The friendships begun on-line deepened and broadened into other areas beyond the common ground they already shared.
Those who worry about the Internet's long reach into our personal and family lives see nothing but good in the ways people like Dwight are using it. The danger, says Northampton family therapist Mary Beth Averill, lies in excessively relying on it to meet and develop social relationships. Though an on-line connection may ease the way for someone who is very shy, Averill cautions that those anonymous connections inevitably involve "a lot of projections." The skills we need to develop healthy relationships, she says, "do need to be used in real life."
Douglas David, a psychology professor at Haverford College in Pennsylvania who studies use of the Internet, says there isn't one answer to whether it will help or hurt families, or our ability to form sustaining relationships.
Someone looking for help with depression on-line, for example, will be "deluged with support" that may be very helpful, he said. On the other hand, "If you are substituting short, anonymous relationships for learning to deal with your parents, then you're at risk."
It could be, David suggests, that the Internet will prove to be the innovation that reverses the damage brought on by the automobile. The car, he says, helped create a segmented society by making it far easier for families to live in different parts of the country. Now, the Internet may bring them closer.
Work and home
Robert Hanna, the technology specialist for the Northampton school department, uses computers and works around computers all day long. At home, he sometimes logs on again, and works some more.
"When I go home, I do things I couldn't get to during the day," he says. He might work on some budget issues, or answer some messages. "And then I'll look up and it's 11 o'clock."
Hanna says the fact that he does not have immediate family in this area is part of the reason he can work at night. "I'm free to be a workaholic," he says with a laugh.
But Hanna's situation isn't unique, family or no family. As Internet technology comes home, so to speak, more and more Americans find the line between two previously distinct parts of their lives isn't as clear as it used to be.
"You can be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I don't want to be," says Leslie Ball at UMass.
Nonetheless, Hanna says, the availability and the ease of using the Internet make it possible to work at home, almost without realizing it. There have been times, he says, when he's gone on-line at home to e-mail his grown children, or to pay a couple of bills. Then he'll decide to check out a couple of Web sites that relate to something at work: "And then I'm back in work mode." It gets "harder and harder and harder," he says, to keep the office at bay.
Nor do vacations necessarily provide a clean break. While many people are aghast at the notion of staying in touch with the office electronically during a sojourn at the beach, others aren't so sure it's all bad.
Robin Raskin of FamilyPC magazine, for one, says she doesn't mind spending a little time each day responding to her e-mail on vacation. "I'd rather do that," she says, "than come back to 7,000 messages."
Raskin's "each to her own" approach may sum up where things are right now, at a time when no one seems quite sure what changes are in store, and how they'll affect us.
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