Leisure time on the Internet - social or lonely?

The social impact of the internet has been in the focus of debates in recent decades. In the beginning of the diffusion the extreme positive or negative views were abundant. From the middle nineties these speculations were replaced by the empirical researches. The main question of these was whether the new communication technologies would facilitate or interfere the maintenance of personal relationships. One branch of these researches considers the Internet usage as a way of spending time, and it analyses the association of net usage with time spending on social and other leisure time activities. This study is aimed to review the main international and Hungarian literature concerning the topic, and my own research results based on the analysis of the World Internet Project's database.