Personal computers and Internet give people new choices about how to spend their time.
Some may use this freedom to share less time with certain friends or family members, but the new technology will also let them communicate more with those they care most about. I know this from personal experience.
Email makes it easy to work at home. I spend most weekends and evenings at home. My working hours aren't much shorter than they once were, but I spend fewer of them at the office. This lets me share more time with my young daughter than I might have if she'd been born before email became such a practical tool.
The Internet also makes it easy to share ideas with a group of friends. Say you do something fun—see a great movie perhaps, and there are four or five friends who might want to hear about it. If you use a telephone to call each one, you may be tired of telling the story. With email, you just write one note about your experience, at your convenience, and send it to all the friends you think might be interested almost at the same time. They can read your message when they have time and read only as they want to. They can reply at their convenience, and you can read what they say at your convenience.
Email is also an inexpensive way to communicate with people who live far away. More than a few parents use email to communicate with their children at college every day.
We just have to, keep in mind that computers and Internet offer another way of communicating. They don't take the place of any of the ways.
