ABSTRACT
In the year 2000, a high-profile Stanford study proclaimed that “the more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings.” Stanford Professor Norman Nie, the principal investigator of the study, cautioned “This is an early trend that, as a society, we really need to monitor carefully” (Stanford press release, 2000). Headlines appeared in numerous publications, attesting to the Internet's deleterious impact on human relationships and echoing earlier research worrying about the zombie-inducing qualities of the Internet. As one of the first moral panics associated with the Internet took shape in the late 1990s, Nie and other members of the research community were quick to assume what we now might think of as rather one-dimensional models of how people interact with the Internet (Nie et al., 2002). In this they reenacted a blame-the-media set piece. Conversely and nearly simultaneously, a blithely optimistic national vision developed around the notion of convergence and the Information Society that associated tremendous economic gains with networks blending telecommunications with computers. Contrary to some of the negative findings associated with using the Internet, convergence proselytizers proclaimed hugely positive transformations for the world. Indeed as a key spokesperson for the convergent world, Vice President Gore proclaimed the inevitability of a networked nation and extolled its positive effects on education and business (The White House, 1993), transforming the nascent Internet into the centerpiece of U.S. industrial policy.
