"In the Facebook age, families spend less time together; Study cites a sizeable shift since 2006" by Barbara Ortutay, Associated Press | June 16, 2009
NEW YORK - Whether it's around the dinner table or just in front of the TV, US families say they are spending less time together.
The decline in family time coincides with a rise in Internet use and the popularity of social networks, though a new study stopped just short of assigning blame.
Michael Gilbert, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, said people report spending less time with family members just as social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are booming, along with the importance people place on them.
Five-year-old Facebook's active user base, for example, has surged to more than 200 million active users, up from 100 million last August. Meanwhile, more people say they are worried about how much time kids and teenagers spend online....
The advent of new technologies has, in some ways, always changed the way family members interact. Cellphones make it easier for parents to keep track of where their children are, while giving kids the kind of privacy they wouldn't have had in the days of landlines.
Television has cut into dinner time, and as TV sets became cheaper, they also multiplied, so that kids and parents no longer have to congregate in the living room to watch it. But Gilbert said the Internet is so engrossing and demands so much more attention than other technologies, that it can disrupt personal boundaries in ways other technologies wouldn't have....
Didn't they say the same about TV?
"It's not like television, where you can sit around with your family and watch," he said. The Internet, he noted, is mostly one-on-one.
Likely because they can afford more Web-connected gadgets, higher-income families reported greater loss of family time than those who make less money. And more women than men said they felt ignored by a family member using the Internet....
I'm sorry, what was that honey? I'm on the computer.
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