Has Email and Internet made us less social? Why spend an evening with your neighbors if you can mass email everyone you know from the comforts of your couch? There are plenty of stereotypes that would suggest the more time you spend in front of a computer, the less likely you are to spend time with real people.
As it turns out, this one is too close to call. The graphs below look at the average number of hours spent either emailing or using the Internet and how it relates to how often you spend an evening out with your neighbors.
Here we see in the year 2000, you could maybe make an argument that people who spent more time emailing were less likely to hang out with a neighbor. But by 2012, it's clear that's not the case and in fact, people who go out with their neighbors spend even more time emailing than people who never go out with their neighbors.
The impact of Internet use is even harder to correlate to how often someone hangs out with their neighbors.
The only definite conclusion is that over the past 10+ years, the rise of the tech industry, the pervasiveness of computing devices (smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) and availability of the Internet (free hot spots, 4G networks, etc.) has resulted in us spending nearly twice as much time Emailing and using the Internet.
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