Not so Isolated After All

Image by Lyn Millett via Flickr

Technology Thursday

Turns out spending hours staring at a flickering screen is not turning us into a nation of friendless, loveless zombies after all! This is according to some interesting results from a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project survey. Who knew??! (Well, me and my friends, for the past 20 years or so, but no matter.)

Yes, contrary to popular stereotype, Americans, even though we have the Internet, are no more isolated now than we were 25 years ago. A few other interesting takeaways from the survey:

• "[O]wnership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks."
• "Social media activities are associated with several beneficial social activities, including having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds."
• "[M]any internet technologies are used as much for local contact as they are for distant communication."

I am not personally a particularly good example of some of these things right now because I'm feeling pretty isolated. That's due to my spouse and I having one toddler, two jobs, and no family nearby to help, so we've not been getting out much. But I've certainly seen these results hold up in my two decades online. Some of the most profound learning I've done has been through Internet discussions. Some of this was back in the days of the freewheeling Usenet. (I once spent hours and hours reading the archives of talk.abortion (long before Google vacuumed up all of Usenet and left it for dead) -- since then I haven't seen or read or heard a single new argument or idea about that issue that wasn't hashed out thoroughly or at least presaged years ago.) But Usenet-style discussions are repeatedly recapitulated in other fora and I think that kind of learning from wide-ranging discussions with diverse sets of participants can and does still happen.

The nature of the Internet itself--its comparative indifference to geography and, worries about the digital divide notwithstanding, to social strata mean that any type of interaction that is more than superficial will almost inevitably involve people who are different from you in one dimension or another. There are, of course, factors that work against this--fears about the "Daily Me" and worries about confirmation bias, for example. But it was certainly refreshing to see some survey results on the Non-Zombie side of the ledger.

Comments

[Katherine]

I'm on the non-Zombie side too. There are so many different ways that people feel comfortable communicating -- it only stands to reason that the more means of communication, the more people will make connections. I personally won't always pick up a phone but it's easy and gratifying to swap emails with a long-distance friend.