Internet and Social Connectedness

When Internet-based communication technologies, such as e-mail and chat, became available to the general public in the 1990s, it was widely assumed in both academic and popular literature that these technologies would reduce people's social connectedness. Social connectedness refers to the relationships that people have with others in their environment (e.g., friends, family members, and neighbors). This reduction hypothesis rested on three assumptions: (1) the Internet motivates people to form superficial online relationships with strangers, which are less beneficial than existing, offline relationships; (2) time spent with online strangers occurs at the expense of time spent with existing friends and relationships; and (3) strong, close offline relationships are replaced by weak, distant online relationships, so that the overall quality of people's relationships is reduced.

The reduction hypothesis received considerable empirical support at the early stages of Internet adoption. Several studies conducted in the second [Page 885]half of the 1990s demonstrated that Internet use significantly reduced people's social connectedness. However, the size of these negative effects was usually small. In such Internet effects studies, social connectedness was operationalized as, for example, the size of people's local network; the time they spent with family members, friends, and neighbors; their perceived social support; or the perceived quality of their relationships with family members and friends.

However, although these reduction effects were demonstrated consistently in the second half of the 1990s, at least two changes in the use of the Internet may render such effects less plausible at the current stage of Internet adoption. First, at the early stages of the Internet, it was hardly possible to maintain one's existing social network on the Internet because the greater part of this network was not yet online. At the time, online contacts were inherently separated from offline contacts. Currently, however, the majority of people in Western countries have access to the Internet. At such high Internet access rates, a reduction effect is less plausible because people have more opportunity to maintain their existing relationships through the Internet than at the early stages of the Internet.

Second, in the past few years, several communication technologies (e.g., IMing and social networking sites) have been developed that encourage users to communicate with existing contacts. Earlier Internet-based communication technologies, such as Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and public chat rooms, were primarily used for communication between strangers around certain topics or activities. However, more recent technologies distinguish themselves from previous ones by people's predominant communication with existing relationships.

Against this backdrop, reductive effects of the Internet on people's social connectedness have become less likely. It is no surprise, therefore, that the majority of studies that appeared in the new millennium have found positive effects of different types of online communication on social connectedness. To explain these positive results, scholars have put forward the stimulation hypothesis. This hypothesis attributes the positive effects of online communication on social connectedness to en hanced intimate self-disclosure. It is assumed that the reduced auditory and visual cues in online communication serve as facilitators of intimate online self-disclosure. This Internet-enhanced self-disclosure seems to occur during communication with existing friends, as well as with newly formed relationships. In fact, the stimulation hypothesis is based on three assumptions. First, the Internet's reduced auditory and visual cues encourage people to disclose their inner feelings more easily than in real-life interactions. Second, intimate self-disclosure is an important predictor of reciprocal liking, caring, trust, and, thereby, of the quality of relationships. Third, this Internet-enhanced intimate self-disclosure stimulates relationship formation and maintenance.

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