Stardate 20010830.1306 (On Screen): There was a much-ballyhooed study which claimed to show that substantial use of the Internet (and the web) made people depressed and withdrawn. They're no longer certain that it's so. For one thing, the study was done in the early days of the Internet. For another, they may have falled for post-hoc fallacy. The correlation seemed to be real: heavy users of the Internet tended to be disproportionately depressed and withdrawn socially. The question they didn't ask was whether it was the case that people who were already like that might be disproportionately seeking out the Internet as a means of contact with the world, so that it was depression which caused internet use rather than the other way around. In any case, as Internet use has expanded, the correlation seems to have collapsed leaving the researchers confused. It probably shouldn't have, of course.
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