This article explores the complex ways in which the Internet affects interpersonal communication and sociability. Dynamic new time-diary data identify when and where Internet use impacts face-to-face interactions. Internet use at home has a strong negative impact on time spent with friends and family as well as time spent on social activities, but Internet use at work has no such effect. Similarly, Internet use during weekend days is more strongly related to decreased time spent with friends and family and on social activities than Internet use during weekdays.

These findings offer support for a "displacement" theory of Internet use -- time online is largely an asocial activity that competes with, rather than complements, face-to-face social time. However, it is the location and timing of Internet use that determines how interpersonal relationships are affected.

The Internet and other information technologies represent a significant departure from previous communication technologies by combining features of both interpersonal communication and mass communication. According to the "functional equivalence" argument that has been applied to the diffusion of earlier communication technologies, one should expect decreases in both types of communication activities as Internet use increases. An effective and comprehensive method for testing which activities are most affected by the Internet is through the 24-hour time-diary studies, in which all daily activity is recorded

When the time-diaries of Internet users and nonusers in a combined 1998-2001 national sample are compared, few consistent differences in the social lives of Internet users are found. This raises questions about whether the Internet acts more to enhance communication behaviors rather than to displace behavior -- which seems to be the case for television, as predicted by the functional equivalence hypothesis.

The ability of time-diary studies to document trade-offs in daily behavior is hampered by their focus on a single day's activities, since there is little time to capture the full range of activities that may result from engaging in any single activity (like IT usage) on a single day. The present study takes advantage of a year 2000 data collection involving a national sample of more than 400 working middle-class families, all of whose members kept a complete weekly account of all their activities. The sample has the additional advantage of being restricted to a relatively homogeneous population group in terms of age, family circumstance and life stage.

The major differences found between Internet users and nonusers in this study is in terms of the 4+ lower paid work hours of Internet users that offset their 4+ weekly hours of Internet use, which took place mainly at home (not at work). That meant that these Internet users did spend more time alone during the week, but not significantly more and not at the expense of contact with family members, relatives or friends. Otherwise the diary figures of Internet users and nonusers are strikingly similar.

Internet use data were collected in the 1998 time-use survey of Statistics Canada, done as part of their General Social Survey. That survey collected single-day diary data from 10,749 persons aged 15 and older by telephone spread across the entire calendar year with a response rate of 78%. Previous Canadian diary results matched U.S. figures rather closely.

Analyzing only the sample aged 18-64, it was found that respondents who reported IT use in their diary also reported about a third less time on all social activities in those diaries, a significant difference that largely held up after adjustment for several demographic predictors. However, when the analysis focused on longer-term users, the difference was less than an hour a week and was not significant. Parallel results were found for time alone and time with friends. It was concluded that the single-day declines in social life are reduced to insignificance when a longer analytic time frame is employed.

The impact of the Internet is put into the context of long-term time-use trends in the United Kingdom, taking advantage of the nearly 40 years of time-diary studies that have been conducted. These trends in time use challenge several popular beliefs about how society has been changing in the wake of new technology and other social changes since WWII.

The main focus of the analysis, however, is on a unique set of panel data in which respondents in nearly 1000 households completed full-week diaries in 1999 and 2000, making it possible to distinguish changes in three groups: prior Internet users, nonusers at both time points and new Internet users. No notable changes in social life were found in any of the three groups across the span of the study, indicating little support for the hypothesis of Internet users suffering significant losses in social life.

The year 2000 General Social Survey (GSS) included old questions on the extent of social visiting and new questions on the extent of social networks. The results provide little support for the conclusion that Internet users and electronic mail users with greater hourly usage lead less active or more constricted social lives than nonusers. There is little evidence of reduced social contact in relation to levels of social visiting in comparison to 1998 or to earlier GSS surveys. There is virtually no difference in the overall visiting of lesser versus greater non-Internet users.

Interestingly, users reported spending more evenings with friends than non-users and fewer evenings with relatives and neighbors. There was no decline in the numbers of people contacted by traditional communication channels among respondents who contacted more and more people by email, or who used the Internet more. There is more evidence to support the Newtonian model of increased social life among Internet users than evidence of any displacement effect.

In addition to the behavioral questions about informal social activity in the year 2000 General Social Survey, GSS respondents were asked questions about the frequency of their attendance at religious activities and of their sexual activity. As might be expected, the two activities are somewhat disparate in terms of their predictors and their relation with Internet use.

Internet users tended to report slightly more religious activity than nonusers both before and after MCA adjustment for demographic predictors -- although heaviest users reported below average attendance. Internet users also reported more sexual activity, but mainly because of their younger age. After adjustments for age and other factors, sexual activity was found to decrease monotonically the more the Internet was used -- not only in MCA results but in analyses using two other regression procedures. Detailed cross-tabulations suggest the main decrease is located among married respondents aged 18-35.

Earlier HomeNet publications reported small but reliable negative effects of using the Internet on measures of social involvement and psychological well-being among new Internet users in a sample of Pittsburgh families in 1995-1996. The effects were called a "paradox" because participants in the sample used the Internet heavily for communication, which typically has positive effects on well-being. Since that first study, the Internet changed markedly, giving people much greater choice of contacts, activities, and information.

In a three-year follow-up of the original sample, these negative effects are no longer evident. A new longitudinal 1998-1999 study of new computer and television purchasers (who used the Internet for communication and for information) found that they generally experienced overall positive effects of using the Internet on communication with friends and family, community involvement, and psychological well-being. Using the Internet generally predicted better outcomes for extraverts and those with more social support -- but worse outcomes for introverts and those with less support. The studies suggest that many people, especially those with good social resources, have integrated the Internet into their ordinary lives to their advantage.

The social impact of the Internet has been a topic of ongoing debate, with some arguing that it may contribute to feelings of social isolation and other arguing that the Internet enhances social connectivity. Using a panel of Internet users asked the same questions in 2000 and 2001, this article documents that serious emailing -- emails sharing worries with or seeking advice from family and friends -- increased sharply over that year. The findings held for both early and late adopters of the Internet, thus changing the norms among all Internet users and making it acceptable to use cyberspace to conduct serious conversations.

The findings also suggest an Internet "network effect" as more people go online, in that the overall value of the online medium appears to be increasing. This is evidenced not only by the growth in serious emailing, but in online transactions and by the use of the Internet in the workplace. Finally, the Internet's novelty effect fades over time, as users report a decline in the frequency of emailing and are less likely to herald the Internet's socially connective effects.

Communities started changing from groups to networks well before the advent of the Internet. Initially, people believed that industrialization and bureaucratization would dissolve community groups and leave only isolated, alienated individuals. Then scholars discovered that communities continued, but more as sparsely-knit, spatially-dispersed social networks rather than as densely-knit, village-like local groups. A similar debate has developed about the impact of the Internet on community. Some fear that it will isolate people from face-to-face interactions. Others extol the Internet's ability to support far-flung communities of shared interest.

Evidence to address this debate about the impact of the Internet on community is thundering in. Three studies done at the NetLab are concomitant with general findings, both in North America and worldwide, that rather than weakening community, the Internet adds to existing face-to-face and telephone contact. Rather than increasing or destroying community, the Internet can best be seen transforming community such that it becomes integrated into rhythms of daily life, with life online integrated with offline activities.

This article provides an overview of the Syntopia Project, and results from nationally representative telephone surveys of Internet use/nonuse and social impacts from 1995, 1996, 1997 and 2000. The main themes covered in the surveys are access, community/political involvement, and social interaction. After a brief overview of associations between Internet use and involvement, the article summarizes the relationships between Internet use and nonuse, and offline and online social interaction.

Essentially, across the samples, Internet users are quite sociable -- they are more involved and socially active than nonusers. These and related results imply that neither dystopian nor utopian views of the social consequences of the Internet are supported by representative survey data. Rather, the results support a more syntopian perspective: the Internet has allowed individuals and groups to find common interests, engage in various types of exchange and create bonds of concern, support and affection that can unite them -- for both good and ill.

As the Internet has rapidly become a mainstream medium, some studies have found that Internet use is associated with reduced social networks and increased loneliness, while other research has suggested virtually the opposite. Still other studies have found no associations at all between Internet use, social networks, and level of loneliness. Some authors who have found that the Internet has a negative impact on social relationships and psychological well-being, have hypothesized that Internet use encourages the creation of online relationships, which in turn replace face-to-face contacts (displacement). Since this results in an overall loss of depth that is more important than breadth for psychological well-being, Internet use consequently increases loneliness.

Using a sample of 2096 Americans surveyed in 2000 to test this theory produces results that are complex. There is no evidence of displacement of face-to-face relationships with online ones, and Internet use is slightly associated with a decreased level of loneliness. However, people who have online friends are more lonely than those who do not. In this way the Internet seems to have both positive and negative effects on psychological well-being. Some suggestions are offered to explain this paradoxical finding.

In this simplified analysis of the UCLA data, an MCA multivariate approach is used to test the relation between Internet use and sociability using both behavioral and attitudinal data in the UCLA surveys. These analyses indicate little consistent evidence of decreased social behavioral contact with friends, relatives and household members among heavier Internet users, after age, education, income, race, gender and marital status are taken into account. However, there is significant evidence of more sociable attitudes (lower loneliness and alienation) among Internet users after adjustment for these same demographic factors in both UCLA surveys. Increasingly sociable attitudes are found among heavier Internet users in one survey, but not the other.

Given the anticipated prosperous Chinese-based market in the near future, a better understanding of the social implications of the Internet among the Chinese population is needed. The current study explored the relation between Internet use and sociability based on a in-house survey of 2,500 adult residents in Beijing and Guangzhou in mainland China and a telephone survey of 1,007 adult residents in Hong Kong.

Three multi-way ANOVAs showed no impact of Internet use on household socializing, socializing with friends, and family interactions in either sample. The results were parallel to the patterns found in an equivalent study in the U.S. The present finding suggests that Internet users live in both the online world and the offline world, and can shift back and forth between the two worlds simultaneously. Social implications of the different functions that offline and online communications serve were discussed.

In addition to the Mainland China data collected by the Hong Kong research team, a separate five-city study in China was conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing that also included the basic UCLA study questions on social life. This study also developed a number of new attitude questions related to social life. Since most Chinese Internet users live in urban areas, the survey was concentrated in five major cities among citizens between the ages of 17-60. About 660 individuals were interviewed in each city leading to a total sample size of 3153 respondents across the five cities.

Internet users report more personal use of the home/cell phone than nonusers. Users also estimate about 40 percent more time in telephone contact and about 10 percent more time in contact with friends. In relation to the ten more general new social attitude items, Internet users emerge as more pro-social on three of them, less social on one of them and no different on the other six items.

This article presents a cross-national comparison between the WIP survey data in Japan and the UCLA samples, using parallel questions and MCA methods with similar dependent and independent variables and coding schemes. In the cross-section correlation between Internet usage and household socializing behavior, no significant relations were found. Further MCA analyses suggest the existence of intervening variables which may or may not involve displacement of time spent in Internet use by other activities than socializing with family or friends.

The significant relation found between heaviest Internet usage and higher level of friend socializing suggest a kind of "virtual community" effect, which expands the sphere of socializing behavior beyond physical time and space limits. However, analysis using the retrospective estimate questions concerning perceived levels of contact produced the opposite relation, namely that heavier Internet users perceived less social contact.

This article addresses the role of trust and other intangible resources and costs in Internet sociability. The model used to analyze the data hypothesizes a dynamic relation between social capital, intangible resources and culture, which helps explain both the positive and negative effects of Internet use on sociability. Sociability in the digitally connected world, with its complexity and its new "costs" of relationships, is bounded. There is a necessary selection, so it is important to understand how this selection is made.

The Internet is neither neutral nor an automatic creator of a frictionless all-symmetrical network society. It makes people change the structural nodes and the organizational relationships of their social networks, while adapting to the dynamics of the new relationship costs and resources. This adaptation seems more evolutionary and culture-driven than just instrumental. These partial results are used to outline the need for a better understanding of sociability dynamics in complex network societies -- beyond the simplification proposed by both techno-pessimists and techno-optimists, but also by the first ideas of the Internet as a neutral medium. The model is tested using multivariate regressions and path analyses of Italian national sample data collected in 2001 as part of the World Internet Project.

The revolution in information technology (IT) has resulted in innovations that are having increasingly visible effects on the life of the average American. These developments are shaping social lives and behaviors, but there has been no systematic, representative study tracking the sociological impact of information technology. Using data from a national random sample of American adults, it is found that the more time people spend using the Internet, the more they lose contact with their social environment. This effect is noticeable even with just 2-5 Internet hours per week, and it rises substantially for those spending more than 10 hours per week.

In this analysis of the year 2000 GSS data of attitudinal differences between Internet users and nonusers, particular attention was devoted to the issue of whether Internet use is associated with more or less diverse political opinions. In general, it was found that where differences existed, they were in the direction of Internet users being more supportive of diverse and tolerant points of view than nonusers. However, the differences were often non-monotonic -- that is tolerance did not always increase the more one used the Internet. Moreover, the differences occurred for some racial/family/sexual/political items but not others, and they do not fit easily under standard labels like liberal, conservative or even libertarian.

Internet users also expressed slightly more optimistic and sociable attitudes on certain other GSS questions. On most GSS items, however, either there were no differences between Internet users and nonusers, or the differences could be explained by age, education, race, gender or income effects.

The Electronic Dialogue Project, designed to test the expectation that group deliberation produces deeper public engagement with political issues, assembled representative groups of citizens to participate in online political deliberations during the 2000 presidential campaign. Sixty groups, drawn from a random sample of Americans, engaged in a series of monthly, real-time electronic discussions about issues facing the country and the unfolding presidential campaign. Preliminary results suggest that online discussions fostered increased political engagement and general community participation. Controlling for initial trust and propensity to attend, the number of discussion events attended is a significant predictor of post-project social trust. The results support the theoretical connection of social capital to active political participation.