Pew-Annenberg has a new bit of research suggesting that folks who regularly use the internet and social networks (and I am obviously one) are less isolated and more social (in the real world) than their offline counterparts.
Fears that the Internet and other personal technologies are making Americans socially isolated are unfounded, according to a Pew Research Center report released Wednesday.
The study comes to the opposite conclusion: that people who use the Internet, instant messaging, mobile phones, photo sharing sites and social networks benefit from being more likely to have a larger, more diverse core of close confidants.
First of all, by definition, shouldn’t your core of close confidants be pretty small?
The whole premise of the findings is off base. There is this invented fear that the internet is isolating us socially. Anyone who has spent five minutes on a social network knows just the opposite is true. The fear is (or should be) that we spend so much time connected with an ever growing social group that we have no time to think deeply or to process incoming information. We also have blurred the lines between close friends and people who we have in our incoming social stream. They all see the photos of our kids and read what used to be private information. And Shaq and Ashton Kutcher are in that stream too. Isolation, at this point is not a fear, it’s a goal. There is less and less room for an internal world. That’s the problem. Of course being connected more often with more people makes us more social. It’s like sharing study findings that having a bowl of ice cream on the table and a spoon in your hand makes it more likely you’re going to eat ice cream.
And let’s focus on the quality of the in-person social interactions we have today as opposed to those we had before social network connected smart phones. Next time your interacting socially, look around. How many of the people are fully experiencing the live social interaction and how many are looking down at their phones?
The other missing piece of the puzzle in this story (which however was a primary finding in an earlier Annenberg study) is where we’re getting all this time to spend online. It’s not coming out of our social time. But we spend a lot less time with our families. I covered this study in an earlier post.
We also need to assess the value of the social interactions we’re adding to the mix. Are they enriching? How many tweets or Facebook posts have you read over the past week that really added value? Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of great things about these technologies. I use them embarrassingly often. I’ve reconnected with former students and long-lost friends and a I keep up with my current social group. But here’s what I really don’t know. Do these positives outweigh the negatives. And can we answer that question if we - especially the hardcore users - are hesitant to discuss the downsides?
If we’re going to get serious about considering the consequences of new forms of communication that are clearly a rabid addiction for many (including me) we need to start asking the right questions. We know the internet is good at what the internet is good at. Let’s cede that point and start asking what it’s doing to our minds.
