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There were lots of dire predictions about how the Internet would affect our lives. Now the research is starting to come in. This much is clear: It will draw us together.
Unless it pulls us apart.
It was supposed to turn us into remote little islands. We'd lose track of time and float anonymously from chat room to chat room on a sea of e-mails. The more we tapped away on our keyboards, the less we were going to vote, attend church, help our kids with their homework.
Worst of all, we were going to be less trusting and generally less healthy and happy.
The Internet was going to open the world to us, but we were going to get so caught up in it that we would neglect our families, our jobs, even ourselves.
We were going to encase ourselves in our own little dead zones.
"The Internet was clearly destined to deepen the isolation of Technological Man from the unhappy consequences of using this blessed electronic system," New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote in 1995.
"Isolation was inherent. A human alone with his machine talking to machines activated by other humans alone. Easy to hide in that maze. Be as bestial as instinct wishes and so what? Hard to catch you, punch your nose, put a stiletto into your kidney."
But that was way back in the mid-1990s, before anybody knew how the Web would affect our lives. Well, we don't have to speculate anymore. Now we have research. Like almost any other major phenomenon, the Internet has been the subject of intensive academic scrutiny. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists - they all lined up for grants to study how we live with the Internet.
Though it's still early, the results are starting to come in.
First, the bad news.
In February, Norman Nie, a political scientist at Stanford University, released one of the first large-scale surveys detailing the impact the Internet has on American society. It showed that as people were spending more time online, they were spending less time in social activities. Less time hosting dinner parties. Less time attending PTA meetings. Less time, Nie said when the report was released, "with real human beings.
"When you spend your time...