Isolated By The Internet

Leslie Hicks
Communications 5
Opinion Paper: “Isolated by the Internet” According to Clifford Stoll, author of the book from which this excerpt, “Isolated by the Internet”, has been removed for our evaluation, the Internet can have harmful, declinitive effects on a persons’ real-life social ties and mental health. He cites a study on internet use by two psychologists from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as an early independent study done by Psychologist Kimberly Young on the effects of internet addiction to support his assertions. In both studies, the internet was shown to increase rates of depression among users, in direct tandem with frequency of use. Also, loneliness increased as the internet was shown to reduce the number of contacts in frequent users’ real-life social circles. By “real-life social circle”, I mean what Stoll defines as Deep Social Ties. Stoll draws a distinction between “weak social ties”, which “have superficial and easily broken bonds, infrequent contact, and narrow focus”, and “Deep social ties” which “are relationships with frequent contact, deep feelings of involvement, and broad context.” In my opinion, Stoll is correct in his assertions. Weak social ties are what is available on the online, as they are not broad in their context, have easily broken bonds, and from my observation, do not increase or evolve in depth overtime. Since this excerpt was written, the creation of social networking, iphones, and ipads, texting, etc., have pushed these weak social ties even further into the forefront of our everyday lives, distracting us at work, distracting us from our conversations with people in our actual presence, and most detrimentally, overriding our ability for deep, clear, focused thought. We are constantly being offset by a text, a tweet, or a facebook update. iPhones and devices like them, in my opinion, have