Create a 13 pages page paper that discusses do duration and motivations of internet use improve social skills. The exact effects of using the Internet on social skills continue to be unclear because of mixed empirical evidence. Though people use the Internet to communicate with family, friends, and peers at work, even superiors, some researchers showed that Internet use has led to poor social skills and adjustment (Engelberg & Sjöberg 2004), as well as bullying behaviors (Schoffstall & Cohen, 2011), anxiety, and loneliness (Kim, LaRose, & Peng, 2009), while others learned that using the Internet for socialization can develop better social skills (Campbell et al., 2006. Titov et al., 2008). Researchers have not studied if only certain uses of the Internet can contribute to poor social skills and psychological health and if media richness, gender, and age can moderate positive/negative outcomes. The study aims to discuss the theoretical background, literature review, rationale, methodology, results, and discussion of findings of the intended research. It will explore if and how age, gender, and duration and motivations of Internet use affect social skills, social anxiety, and loneliness. The next section identifies and defines the variables of this study, as well as the communication model used.

The theoretical background explores the concepts and theories used in the study. The independent variables are duration and motivation in Internet usage, while the dependent variables are communication skills, social anxiety, and loneliness. The four included Internet activities were e-mail, chatting, social networking, and video calling. The moderating variables are media richness, gender, and age. The duration of Internet use refers to how long participants used the Internet. Using the Internet for more than five hours a day at least five times a week is considered heavy usage (Joiner et al., 2012, p.371). The motivations for Internet use may depend on the kind of tools employed. The motivations usually for e-mail are “interpersonal communication, personal gain, and business reasons.” for chatting and video calling, information-seeking, affection, social utility, and accessibility. and for social networking, social connection, shared identities, shared images, content gratification, social investigations, social networking surfing, and updating (Park, Chung, & Lee, 2012, p.358). These motivations are not meant to be exhaustive, but they try to include as many motivations as possible.