Hey I found an article that actually says that it does not. It was a six-year study done by Univ of South California. It has some other interesting numbers in there but this was the main paragraph that basically said people spending time in front of their computers all day really didn't take time away from their real-life friends:
"What might be a surprise, though, is that all of this online interaction is apparently not detracting from interaction with close friends and family offline. While 37.7 percent of respondents said that the Internet helps them communicate more with family and friends, "almost all" users reported that increased Internet interaction has no effect on the amount of time spent with those people in real life."
My question is do you think this is accurate or do you think "almost all" users responded that way because they didn't want to say they were neglecting their offline friends because they were participating too much with online activities?
Here's the link
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I think the power of denial can be very strong. Which is not to say that I think the Internet takes that much time away from our offline friends. I just think that this kind of empirical study can be very weak, for several reasons. (1) Asking people whether they "think" the Internet detracts time from friends is not a very accurate way to get at whether or not it does. It measures perceptions rather than behaviors, and perceptions are notoriously unreliable. (2) Surveys like this have been shown to be extremely sensitive to the wording of the question. For example, asking "does the internet detract from the time you have available for your offline friends?" is likely to give wildly different results from "Does the internet help you spend more time with your offline friends?"; and these will give wildly different results from "Estimate how much time you would spend with offline friends if you spent 2 hours less per day on the internet." (3) Depending upon whether the survey was given online, via telephone, in person, etc., results will vary. Likewise, sample selection will have a strong impact - was the sample truly random?
Assessing a survey like this really requires looking long and hard at how they chose their sample, what survey techniques they used, what the population characteristics are, etc.
That was a long answer. The short one is that I really suspect that people that like to spend a lot of time on the computer will not be willing to admit to themselves or to others that it could have negative consequences on their offline relations.
On the other hand, I pretty much live on the computer, and it has no adverse impact on MY offline relationships, lol. :-D
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