Technology not causing social isolation: Pew study

This morning the Sydney Morning Herald was reporting that, "Contrary to popular belief, technology is not leading to social isolation and Americans who use the Internet and mobile phones have larger and more diverse social networks, according to a new study." I can't see any differentiation between quanitity of contacts and quality of contacts though.

Comments

[Sally]

That I think is an important point, I recently thinned out my facebook contacts to those I feel that I have a meaningful connection with and lost over 100 names from my list.

I count menaingful contacts as those I can have a conversation with either in cyber space or as folk that I know IRL. There is too much surface connecting going on which detracts from meaningful conversation and connection, I bemoan the loss of good dialogue through blogging and wonder how much the superficiality of facebook is to blame!

[Andrew]

I wonder if the SMH writer took into account the large of youths worldwide who are addicted to internet games.

A lenghty documentary feature on 60 minutes last week about it.

The doco told how thousands of Chinese youth addicted to computer games are being placed in an army run program to detox them from it.

China also hosted the world championship for computer game players this year, which is fairly ironic.

Yep. The internet certainly has improved the social network for many people.

But computer technology also has its downside.

One of my sons is highly addicted to playing computer games. He works a few hours a day at his job at KFC, but the rest of the time sits behind his computer until 2pm at nigh. At his age (21) we've tried a great many strategies to address that over the years, but without success.

Computer games addiction is extremely socially isolating for many youths worldwide according to the documentary. Kids tend to lose all sense of time-awareness, their grooming often deteriorates, it detrimentally effects their sense of reality of the world around them, it can stimulate anti-social behaviour and even violence or psychosis in the worst case scenarios. It is extremely hard to break the addiction according to the health experts and needs similar detox processes to other sorts of drug addictions.

Yep. For us bloggers, emailers, students, researchers etc - computer technology has great social benefits. But computer technology also has its downside for many others too.

[Matt Stone]

... losing all sense of time awareness ... hmmm, I'm not sure I had that in the first place.