Blame it on email

Journalists are always asking me to provide quotes about how online dating sites, cyber-affairs, and cybersex are causing increasing rates of marital breakdown. I nearly always respond by pointing out that we don't blame school parent-teacher groups when the parents of school kids hook up and have an affair, so why blame the internet? Then there was the HomeNet Study (revisited here) (Please Note: This study was NOT by Pew Internet - see comment below) a few years ago that suggested, based on a study in Pittsburgh which must be one of the most depressing cities to live in on Earth, that use of the internet causes increasing levels of social isolation. I disagreed with this particular study, largely because I had concerns about the research methodology.

Now it turns out that email can be bad for you too, at least according to a new study, reported by BBC News Online, that found "Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana".

The ghist of the study was that it's not particularly good for your mental health to be constantly bombarded with information from a variety of sources. And that constant bombardment means that many of us spend more time filtering and sifting through the junk and less time focussing on the important information that crosses our paths.

I forwarded a link to this article on to a friend of mine who runs a Cannabis Legalisation Campaign at http://www.thehempire.com. He said "As usual the newspapers have blown this out of proportion.  I'm not sure about the impact of email on IQ but I do know that cannabis only lowers it temporarily. Stop using and the IQ level comes back to normal. Though how you get people to stop using email is another matter entirely."

I guess we're all doomed. Again.

[Related link: "is TV good for you?" ]

Comments

[Lee Rainie]

I guess it should be flattering to us here at the Pew Internet & American Life Project to think that some people believe that when there is a mime about the internet, it must have come from our work. In some cases, that is true. In this case it is not.

You say: "Then there was the Pew Internet study a few years ago that suggested, based on a study in Pittsburgh which must be one of the most depressing cities to live in on Earth, that use of the internet causes increasing levels of social isolation. I disagreed with this particular study, largely because I had concerns about the research methodology."

We never did any such study. It predates our existence. We went into operation in December 1999 and this study by the HomeNet Project by scholars at Carnegie Mellon University was published in 1998 in the journal "American Psychologist." Furthermore, our work on the social impact of the internet has been based on national phone surveys, not geographically centered work in places like Pittsburgh.

Further, furthermore, the researchers at HomeNet did follow-up work on their original study and revised their findings about the social impact of the internet in a follow-up report. They said that the rapid adoption of the internet and people's increasing comfort with using it actually provided social benefits. A good discussion of the two HomeNet studies can be found here: http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr02/time.html. And the original works can be found through Prof. Robert Kraut's publications page here: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut/RKraut.site.files/pubs/articles.html.

Just for the record, our inaugural research report argued the exact opposite of what you say. It argued that people believe email enhances their connections to friends and family and increases the amount of communication people have with friends and family. Check it out: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/11/report_display.asp.

It would be honorable of you to correct your post -- before we all turn into vegetables because, as the Institute of Psychiatry folks point out, we are getting more stupid by the minute coping with all this email traffic.

[Lee Rainie]

I should have done a tad more homework on this posting. It turns out that the article you wrote in criticism and linked to in your comment (http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/mphil/mphil1.html) actually has the correct citation of the HomeNet research.

There is no mention of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in your work. Indeed, it would have been impossible to mention us because you wrote the article more than a year before my Project was born.

[Robin]

Apologies, Lee, and all the Pew Internet people. I'm impressed with much of your work (http://www.pewinternet.org/) and have no criticisms at all of your methodology.

I obviously need to take a break from email.

The blog entry has been corrected - it was Carneghie Mellon researchers who wrote the HomeNet study which, as Lee pionts out above, has attracted quite a lot of criticism and was even later revisited by it's principle authors.

Thanks for alerting me to the mistake and also for the useful links.