Saturday, June 13, 2009
Ever since the beginning of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and the sudden popularity of social networking sites, experts have raised fears that people will give up on real relationships in favor of virtual ones. Having decided to see if there really has been a decline in social connectivity in America, two academics crunched a wealth of numbers and concluded that a world of Facebook and MySpace is not destroying friendships in America—in fact, it’s doing just the opposite.
Barry Wellman, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, and Hua Wang, a PhD student at the University of Southern California, reviewed two national surveys to see if the Internet this decade has caused a detrimental effect on interpersonal relationships. What they found was that “friendships continue to be abundant” among most adult Americans (those 25 to 74 in age) and that “heavy users” of the Internet (more than three hours a day online) are “particularly active, having the most friends both on- and off-line.” Instead of causing people to withdraw and stay home, the Web “may be providing more ways to contact existing friends, make new friends, and strengthen ties,” wrote Wellman and Wang.
Their data showed that only 22% of Internet users actually have virtual friends and only 15% have made friends online who later became face-to-face friends. However, using the Internet seemed to strengthen existing friendships. Non-users of the Internet averaged 9.1 friends, while heavy users averaged 13.1, and the gap between the two groups widened between 2002 and 2007.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Social Connectivity in America: Changes in Adult Friendship Network Size from 2002 to 2007 (by Hua Wang and Barry Wellman, American Behavioral Scientist) (PDF)
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