Don't believe everything you hear

It seems intuitive that the rise of the Internet and social networking sites has made us all more lonely. Because we are all constrained with our time and because online connections seem shallow, it logically follows that the more time we spend online in lieu of face-to-face interactions, the more lonely we are. Though, the empirical evidence is not as clear on this as we have been lead to believe.

Fortunate or not, I remember the days when a phone call across the country to family was expensive and short. Now, I regularly have free conversations with friends a couple of continents away.  Advances in cameras and expanding bandwidth speeds have made those experiences more immersive and intimate. Simultaneously, social networking sites now allow us to more easily stay in touch with acquaintances, helping us to build and maintain much larger social networks.

Sociologists and psychologists tend to agree,

His new book, Still Connected, definitively refutes the Marche thesis that Americans have grown more detached. Drawing on 40 years of social surveys, Fischer shows that the quality and quantity of Americans’ relationships are about the same today as they were before the Internet.

I am not worried:

For all our talk of self-reliance and rugged individualism, Americans are actually far less likely to live alone and enjoy key forms of personal autonomy than people in other countries, including France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, and Japan. What distinguishes Americans is not that we are more isolated, but that we spend more time and energy worrying about whether we are.