A good question indeed…

Bryan Caplan asks: Has the internet helped the socially awkward?

Being a guy who is extremely introvert, this question of course is of some interest to me. According to a commenter, Todd Kendall, the data says that “there is little prima facie evidence that the internet is, on net, reducing geeks’ offline social awkwardness towards the opposite sex, at least”. Thus if I am to believe him, the data is inconclusive (at least when considering the gender component).

I can think of a few effects when answering Bryan’s question:

1) The internet is a substitute to normal social interaction with people “out in the real world”. Thus, the internet has a negative impact on social skills. An exemplification of how this effect might work: Spending much time communicating with people online means spending much time communicating with people via text. This would tend to make you forget that communication is a lot more than just words (ie. facial impressions, eye contact, tone of voice ect). As some introverts (in particular people with aspergers/mild autism) already have problems with these things, internet activity would tend to make their problems with adapting to “real world” social settings harder.

There is a problem with this argument of course: Social interaction on the internet is a substitute to a lot of other things besides “normal social interaction”. One might have read a book instead, or watched the last episode of The Sopranos. So it is far from a given that the sign has to be negative.

2) Selection- and clustering effects. There’s a great deal of social clustering on the internet. This means geeks can “hang out” with geeks much more than they would otherwise be able to do, greatly widening the gap between them and “ordinary people” (whoever they might be). This would of course also result in a negative impact on social skills.

3) Having said a, you have to say b as well. Even if the internet is a substitute to normal social interaction, it certainly is a complement as well. This effect would tend to increase the social interaction of introverts with others, leading to their participation in social activities in which they would otherwise (in a non-internet world) not have participated. That said, I doubt the spill-over effects Caplan considers play a large role. There’s a self-confidence effect to be sure, but I doubt if it is significant. The main problem to me is that the self-confidence element is not exogenous; whether you feel succesful, witty or whatever after having made friends online depend a great deal on the self-confidence level a priori. A boost in self confidence this way is of course also conditional on you realizing that you are in fact making progress/friends. In some areas of the virtual world this is easy to see, but in others it is much less clear.

4) Even if The Internet would result in marginally poorer real world social skills among introverts, this doesn’t in itself mean they are worse off. The opposite might be true; introverts seem to have a comparative advantage communicating online they were unable to fully take advantage of before the internet came about, so the fact that they now have the choice to substitute real world social interaction with online ditto means that they are on average better, not worse off. A variant of the “leveling the playing field” argument.

5) There’s a theoretical point to be made in favor of the internet making people less geeky. People with poor interpersonal social skills could in theory use the internet as a way to learn some basic do’s and dont’s from people better endowed in that area. For example I have no personal experience in dating, yet I still know a little bit about the subject, because of various blog-entries written by “imaginary people”. I would not overstate the importance of this effect, but it’s there.