Yay Internet!

Internet use cuts you off from the world, ruins your social life and consigns you to a life spent indoors, tap-tapping away on your laptop as you grow fatter, sweatier and more horrible to behold. Well, that’s the conventional wisdom. In the recent past, studies seemed to back up the Internet-as-social-death thesis.

A 2006 study argued that Americans have grown more and more socially isolated since 1985, hinting that the Internet and cell phones were the culprit. Sociologists claimed that networking technologies pulled Americans away from their traditional social settings and shoot-the-shit locales and into a world of weaker, Web-based social ties. The Internet was clearly making us lonelier, sadder and fatter as we stared at our computer screens and brushed the Doritos dust off our pale, flaccid bodies. That’s how the conventional wisdom went.

Think again. A new tech Pew Report has revealed something surprising: Internet and cell phone users enjoy larger and more diverse real-world social networks than their technophobe counterparts. Say what?

Believe it. The study of 2,512 adults found that Americans’ rates of social isolation haven’t changed much since 1985. Today, as back then, a mere 6 percent of the population is defined as socially isolated people who report that they have “no one to discuss important matters with.” Rates remain the same today. Though American discussion networks (i.e. the people one regularly talks to) have shrunken in the past decade, the study found that frequent Internet and cell phone users had larger discussion groups than their peers — proving that yakking away on instant message or via text message may be better for the soul than previously thought.

Social media networks, the study found, have a surprisingly positive affect on warm, fuzzy community-building activities. Bloggers, forum-frequenters, online photo-sharers and other Web geeks talk with people outside their own social class or race on a more regular basis — and are much more likely to discuss politics with someone who doesn’t share their own views. How the hell do you think all those virulent online debates got started? Cell phone users and bloggers are in fact more likely to be involved in volunteering and other similarly civic activities, subverting the old stereotype of computer-geek-as-hermit. Though Americans in general are reporting less connection with their neighborhoods and less diverse social groups, many suspect these effects can be chalked up to other social changes — the shifting nature of the family and the nomadic American lifestyle chief among them. Internet and cell phone use may be helping to reverse the isolation trend, rather than worsen it.

Furthermore, people who might have resigned themselves to lives of lonely geek-dom are finding solace and companionship in the online world: Prior to the Internet, eccentric people with weird tastes, hobbies or opinions might have considered themselves completely alone in the Pew Report’s socially isolated 6 percent of the population.

No longer — and I know, because I lived it. For a painfully nerdy kid at a small high school, the Internet was a godsend. It provided me with a world-wide network of buddies, confidants and online companions, a network that got me through my awkward years relatively unscathed. I matured into a socially active and outgoing young adult, but the Internet got me over the hump and helped me feel normal and accepted during the years when I was certain that, outside the online world, I wasn’t. I know I’m not alone. I suspect that the sociologists of the future will be producing some very interesting work on just what these online networks achieved. Anyone want to start an Internet studies department with me at some accommodating major university a few years from now? Anyone?

So let’s shed the popular perception that Internet geeks and techies must necessarily lead stunted and sad social lives. That Doritos n’ sweaty armpits stereotype may have been true back in the earliest days of the Internet, when technology’s illuminati were few and far between and Internet users constituted an outsider social group all their own. Now, the Internet is ubiquitous, global and used by almost everyone — and that translates into a social network more powerful, diverse and interesting than anything the world has seen before.

I’m interested in how Tulane students use and interface with the Internet. Feel free to send me an email about new media, the Internet or general geeky-ass matters (I won’t judge) at sgreenwo@tulane.edu