ALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 15  The Internet is creating a class of people who spend more hours at the office, work still more hours from home, and are so solitary they can hardly be bothered to call Mom on her birthday.

THOSE ARE some of the conclusions of a major new study of Internet users conducted by Stanford Universitys Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society. But even before its official unveiling here today, the survey of 4,113 people was receiving extensive criticism, guaranteeing another round of debate over the effect of this new technology. Were moving from a world in which you know all your neighbors, see all your friends, interact with lots of different people every day, to a functional world, where interaction takes place at a distance, said Norman Nie, a Stanford professor of political science and director of the institute. Can you get a hug, a warm voice, over the Internet? A quarter of the survey respondents who use the Internet more than five hours a week said they spend less time with friends and family, either on the phone or in person. Ten percent said it had reduced out-of-home social activities. If personal interaction  not to mention time with such old-fashioned media as newspapers and, particularly, television  were losers, employers benefited. A quarter of the respondents said the time they spent working at home had increased, while their hours at the office had either stayed the same or gone up as well. No wonder Ford Motor Co. recently said it would give all its employees a personal computer and Internet connection, Nie said. They just bought themselves hundreds of thousands of hours of free labor, he said. You no longer have to pack a briefcase to work at home. Now its all sitting there waiting for you. Yet if people are doing work at home, theyve also brought their home into work. One reason theyre not getting everything done at the office may be that theyre so busy writing e-mail to far-flung chums, ordering books from Amazon.com, sending cards via BlueMountain.com, checking on the price of Cisco stock, researching their vacation in Tuscany, gambling on electronic lotteries and gazing upon Pamela Anderson Lees raw beauty. In other words, work time and home time are blending. Life becomes a continuous stream organized around the Internet, Nie said. But while the scholar believes the Internet is, on balance, making employees more productive, other experts disagree.

William D. Bygrave, who teaches at the Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College in Massachusetts, used to monitor the daily traffic for the Drudge Report, which cyber-muckraker Matt Drudge would helpfully post at his site. I noticed his weekday traffic was much, much greater than his Saturday and Sunday traffic, even though he was breaking new stories on weekends to heighten interest in his TV show on Saturday evening and his radio show on Sunday evenings, the professor said. Bygraves explanation: Workers read Drudges home page from their offices during the day rather from their homes on evenings and weekends. He noted, too, that eBay always seems to have traffic snarls during weekdays rather than on evenings and weekends. Its time that used to be spent at the water cooler or getting a cup of coffee. Except were still doing that, too, Bygrave said. So we say, I can finish this project tonight or early tomorrow morning. Before the Web there was a lot more pressure to clear your desk by the end of the day. Now its never cleared. Two-thirds of those surveyed spend fewer than five hours a week on the Net, and their behavior changed little. But the longer people have been hooked up to the Net, the more time they spend on it, the study found. So Nie predicted that the trend toward social withdrawal would only increase, which meant the issue should be closely examined now. The automobile promised a great many things and delivered them, he said. But if we began to think of the negatives at the beginning of the last century, maybe wed have done some things differently, and it wouldnt take two hours on a rainy day to get from San Francisco to Palo Alto  the 40-mile route he drives every day. But critics who saw early drafts of the news release on the survey today or had the results described to them dismissed most of what Nie  a former study director at the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago and a senior scientist for Gallup  concluded, as well as the research he used to get there. The assertion that the Internet is socially isolating has not held up to serious scrutiny, said Donna Hoffman, co-director of the eLab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. All of the research evidence Ive seen points the other way  not to mention the anecdotal evidence.

The data for the survey was collected in December. While the research was conducted under the auspices of the Stanford institute, the actual work was done by InterSurvey, a Menlo Park company. Nie is also a co-founder of InterSurvey, whose backers include a number of leading venture-capital firms as well as The Washington Post Co. In its negative implications, the study seemed to echo a much smaller one conducted in 1998 by the Carnegie-Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction Institute, which found small but reliable declines in social and psychological well-being among heavy Net users. That study came in for a barrage of criticism, with some arguing that part of the reason for the depression might have had to do with the fact that those surveyed all lived in Pittsburgh. Theres a lot of professional rewards for focusing on the negative, said James Katz, a professor in the department of communication at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His own research, he said, showed that more than a million new friendships have been found online that have lead to face-to-face meetings. In any case, why not assume its a good thing that people are going online to get away from those surrounding them? Being free from the strictures and the sanctions of your neighbors and family used to be considered good, Katz said. This is what America and the Wild West were founded on. It used to be considered good. Now we have a new, endless frontier, and suddenly we have a lot of people wringing their hands. Patrick McKeown, a business professor at the University of Georgia who recently wrote a textbook that explores the issue of living in Internet time, said it would be best to avoid value judgments about what the Net was doing to people. These are the facts of life as we know it. The Net puts us into social contact in a different sense than what we were used to, McKeown said. Its now the faceless people you can communicate with. Its almost like were back in Nebraska in 1910 in a homestead, where it was just you and your family and you wouldnt see anyone else for days, he added. We had a period of urbanization, now were going back to what is almost a rural lifestyle  a homestead within your house. Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report. ) 2000 The Washington Post Company

-- Vern (bacon17@ibm.net), February 16, 2000

Answers

...[The Carnegie-Mellon] study came in for a barrage of criticism, with some arguing that part of the reason for the depression might have had to do with the fact that those surveyed all lived in Pittsburgh...

My guess would be that the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce won't be quoting that line in their brochures, y'know?

-- I'm Here, I'm There (I'm Everywhere@so.beware), February 16, 2000.

Yet, a positive side to all this cyber-interaction is some form of socialization for shut-ins, especially those in rural areas, and here I'm thinking of a elderly shirt-tail relative of mine who still lives on a farm, 50 miles from a Wal-Mart, who has a bad leg and generally doesn't feel like driving into town. He now belongs to several cyber communities, where he plays chess and bridge online, and he's learning how to program in Basic, just because he wants to. In short, he has a new lease on life.

-- (ladybuckeye_59@yahoo.com), February 16, 2000.