SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW Robinson et al. / MASS MEDIA USE AND SOCIAL LIFE Mass Media Use and Social Life Among Internet Users

The mass media use and social life of heavy, light, and nonusers of the Internet and personal computers are compared based on a fall 1998 survey of 3,993 nationally representative respondents age 18 and older. As in previous surveys, no significant or consistent evidence of time displacement of such media or social activities was found. Indeed, Internet users showed signs of more active social lives than nonusers. These results reinforce the conclusion that personal computer/Internet use may have more in common with time-enhancing home appliances such as the telephone than they do with the timedisplacing technology of television. Keywords: Internet, personal computers, information technology, social impacts, time displacement, mass media use S ince the commercialization of the telegraph in the mid-19th century, telecommunications technology has gone through a series of transformations. Before the last decade, however, only two fundamentally distinct formats had crystallized. In the first format, we find a mode of switched, point-to-point, two-way communication, with capacity to initiate as well as reply; similar to personal face-to-face communication, it is also relatively equally dispersed. This produces a communication network with the distinctive structure of potential communications between any pair of points, without any central control. Switched, point-to-point communication was characteristic of the telegraph itself but is perhaps most clearly exemplified by the telephone. In contrast, the second broadcast format involves a unidirectional form of communication. Here, capacity to originate communication remains centralized, communication itself is not targeted to particular recipients, and capacity to receive communication is widely dispersed. Insofar as components of this format are arranged into a network capable of two-way communication, it is in the form of a central backbone linking originators of broadcasts; recipients of the broadcast are linked to one another only by their common receipt of a single message. Such highly centralized broadcast communication is characteristic of radio and cinema, but more prominently today of television