The cyber-world expands people’s social networks and even encourages people to talk by phone or meet others in person, a new study finds.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.
Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.
The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.
Some of the changes in phone contact also will begin to reflect computer/Internet life. We used to phone family members at a certain rate using cell phones — because they were less expensive than land lines. Now, with Skype and cell phones predominant, we’re dropping land lines throughout our extended family.
What a shock! Geeks aren’t isolationists that do nothing but play computer games all day. Who knew? ;->
This kind of “discovery” reminds me of a conversation I had one night in a bar. I was there with my wife and the guy next to us was regaling the bartender about the greatness of Keanu Reeves. (After this guy left, the bartender told us that this guy was actually in the second Matrix movie as one of the agents.) We countered that Keanu was the worst actor we had seen in a long time even if he might be a nice guy. We stated that his portrayal of Neo was unlike any computer person we had ever met. The computer people we knew were eccentric, had numerous interests some including music, art (both digital and not) and even theatre. We told this guy that based on movies like Swordfish, Hollywood knew as much about computer people as it did computers (which would be nothing).
Most non-computer people have this image in their head of a computer person being the 1950’s geek with a pocket protector and anyone that uses technology must fit this image. To those in the know, watching people “discover” that everyday people are interested in technology is part of life’s entertainment reel for the rest of us.
Thomas, computer geeks are taking over the world. We are building God. God is a computer programmer (and a blogger).
Have you heard of the Singularity? It is coming. It is a point where technology as graphed with time, reaches infinity. The data is there. See Ray Kurzweil’s book, “The Singularity is Near”.