The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships: Personal Relationships: On and Off the Internet

That the internet is a communication medium for personal relationships is obvious. That the nature of the internet affects the nature of personal relationships has often been proclaimed – recall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” – but less often proven, especially in field studies. How might the internet have an impact? Although the internet has captured popular attention as a communication and information medium, a substantial body of research has only developed recently. This chapter discusses the role of the internet in personal relationships. It starts with a brief description of the socially relevant characteristics of internet technology and a summary of the debate between utopian and dystopian accounts of internet use on personal relationships. Both of these accounts are inadequate because they take a technologically deterministic approach that ignores the causal role of the individual’s need to maintain offline social relationships. Research that examines the internet’s role in facilitating communication between family and friends, forming new social ties and neighboring relations shows that the internet is neither destroying nor radically altering society for the better. Rather, research results point to the need for a more holistic account of internet use that places internet use in the broader context of all personal relationships. They suggest that the interpersonal patterns associated with internet use are the continuations of a shift in the nature of personal networks that began well before the advent of the internet. This shift toward “networked individualism” involves the transition from spatially proximate and densely-knit communities in which people belong to more spatially dispersed and sparsely-knit personal networks in which people maneuver.