Feel Isolated? Buy a Smart Phone, Get on Facebook, Says a New Study

In the ongoing debate over the extent to which loneliness, alienation and social isolation are serious problems  in contemporary U.S. society, at least one new study has found that technologies such as cell phones, social media, and the Internet itself may be helping reduce such problems, not increase them.

According to a study released this week by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.”

These findings, which were based on “telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample” of 2,512 adults,” in the contiguous 48 states, contradict earlier studies, which tended to pinpoint technology as a cause of isolation, not as a potential solution.

Digging into the study’s methodology, I see that one reason Pew researchers may have been able to unearth this new perspective is that they appear to have made a concerted effort to close what you might call the “cell-phone gap,” i.e., the growing number of young adults who only use cell phones, not land lines.

Thus, this study includes the behavior of younger adults more so than traditional telephone surveys have been able to achieve in recent years, just as this gap has been becoming more pronounced.

Studies come out every week about every manner of social trend, of course, and many of them seem to simply confirm the conventional wisdom. So, what I specifically like about this one is that it challenges what has appeared to be a tentative consensus among social scientists, while not being at all counter-intuitive.

Think about it.

If you are a fairly regular user of Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter, or even just email, you probably have had the experiences that I have, over and over, of reconnecting with old friends who’d long been out of touch.

You may not establish a new intimacy, exactly (one of the issues addressed by the study is how many truly intimate friends the average American has — it’s roughly two), but it’s good to catch-up and exchange occasional notes with these former colleagues and friends, and it certainly helps break down the feeling that you are isolated.

Thus, mobile phone users reported, on average, having 12 percent more “close friends.” The researchers also said Americans who regularly use digital technologies make more visits to social venues like cafes and parks.

The study did uncover some signs of what would traditionally be called anti-social behavior, in that social media mavens were less likely to know their immediate neighbors, but I’m not sure whether or not this in fact is a causative relationship.

One factor to keep an eye on over the coming years as more studies such as this one come out, is the growing influence of mobile devices, as opposed to desktop and laptop computers, on the overall sense of social isolation as measured in our population.

Sitting at a desk to “connect” with other people is a more isolating behavior, certainly, than taking your network with you wherever you go. Under the mobile paradigm, you can connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

In the end, the choice is yours. As a therapist friend of mine once put it, “The most radical thing you can ever do is…just connect.”