Now The Internet Makes You Neglect Family And Chores?

Over the years, there have been plenty of (usually easily discredited) studies that claimed the internet was bad for you. Perhaps the most famous, was the Carnegie Mellon study done in 1998 that got the NY Times treatment, claiming that people online were lonely and depressed. Of course, it wasn't hard to pick apart the study's methodology (including the fact that they only interviewed people in Pittsburgh, which hardly seems like a representative sample). Three years later, the same group of folks announced in a new study that the internet no longer made people depressed -- but the damage was still done. Every year or so, we tend to see another such study making similar claims about how awful the internet is. In 2000, it came from researchers at Stanford, for example.

The latest, focusing on Canada, is that heavy use of the internet makes you neglect your family and your chores. Of course, reading the details, it seems to indicate that spending time on the internet means you spend less time on "other stuff," which makes quite a bit of sense given the fairly consistent "only 24 hours in a day" thing that's been going on for a while. At least that article quotes a few people who note this is silly. Other press mentions really play up the negative angle, calling internet users "a lonely lot," or "loners." At least some are questioning this spin, noting that the study qualified "heavy users" as anyone who spends more than an hour online -- which is a pretty random number.

Hell, if you did a study looking at people who spend more than an hour on anything every day, you'd probably find they spend less time on other things that those who don't focus that much on one thing. Spend an hour playing golf every day? You probably spend less time with family than those who don't play so much golf. Meanwhile, as for the claims of those internet users being loners, it appears the study actually notes that people who spend a lot of time are still perfectly social. Apparently they just discovered what plenty of other studies have noted for years as well: the internet is a communications tool, and people use it to socialize (wow! really?). So, can we please stop with these types of studies that make huge generalizations that don't really stand up?