Attacks on IT and Social Relationships

Many have speculated on how IT can affect human relationships. For technology fans, the ways in which one can sustain a relationship with electronic communications, as well as the increase in forums where one can make acquaintances promise a boon for human relationships. Others are more skeptical. Virilio argues that online relations, specifically online chat relations, are bad for other normal relations. He writes that the speed and transcendence of geographic boundaries creates an unnatural intensity in human relationships that threatens social institutions. By creating the wide variety of other, more immediate options for human relationships, especially romantic ones, we may be threatening social institutions that on which our society rests. At an extreme, “remote acts of love” could eliminate the need or desire for actual reproduction. While this sounds pretty far fetched, some lines do begin to blur. If pornography is that much more available, is the marginal benefit of a standard relationship reduced? If a spouse seeks romantic company from an online friend, never meeting in person, some would argue that it does not count as adultery. On a more analytic notes, some recent studies have suggested that Internet users' social lives suffer as they spend more time online.

Allan Friedman
January, 2002