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Abstract
This study investigated the relationship between teenagers' Internet use and their interpersonal communication behavior - most of all, whether Internet use was associated with the teens' loss of desire for face-to-face communication with family and friends. Also examined was whether any loss of desire for face-to-face communication with family and friends was linked to certain motives for going online. The findings of this study were based on statistical analyses of 405 valid returns of self-administered questionnaires from 657 students of Carbondale Community High School in Carbondale, Illinois, who were selected through a purposive sampling. The results showed that Internet use was significantly correlated with decreases in face-to-face communication with family (r = - .137, p < .01) and with decreases in desire for face-to-face communication with family (r = - .120, p = .01). Most significantly, this study found that Internet use displaces not only the time the teens spent with family, but also their desire for spending time with family.
Introduction
No field of human life has been more affected by the Internet than the way people communicate with others, as Fulk and Ryu (1990) and Williams and Rice (1983) predicted. Chesebro and Bonsall (1989) even argued that the Internet "is altering how, if, and when people talk to each other in all social systems and even in the privacy of the American home" (p. 7). The Internet is fundamentally changing human communication.
Such a tremendous impact of the Internet on human communication raises a legitimate question: Is the Internet displacing or supplanting face-to-face communication, particularly among family members and friends? Considering the importance of face-to-face interaction in social life, the question should have been extensively examined, but surprisingly few studies have been done. None of the studies has gone further than scratching the surface. Only a few scholars, such as Nie and Erbring (2000), have gone beyond the usual new media vs. traditional media displacement study to explore the relationship between Internet use and interpersonal communication with family members.
Significantly, the findings of the previous studies are mixed at best. For example, Nie and Erbring (2000) and Kraut et al. (1998) found that the more people used the Internet, the lonelier they felt and the less they engaged in interpersonal...