My friend (in both the online and phys­i­cal worlds), Kate Car­ruthers asks an inter­est­ing ques­tion in her post Are social net­works breed­ing social iso­la­tion? Kate con­cludes that for her and her cir­cle of friends who she asso­ciates with online and phys­i­cally, this isn’t the case, but has other friends who are con­cerned. They need not be.

The notion of iso­la­tion as a con­se­quence of social net­work use has been given the lie in the lat­est Pew Inter­net and Amer­i­can Life Project pub­li­ca­tion — Social Iso­la­tion and New Tech­nol­ogy. While it’s US research, I imag­ine the find­ings very much extend to Aus­tralia and other West­ern countries.

The report is a really inter­est­ing read, pro­vid­ing some inter­est­ing insight into the level of reliance and impor­tance we are all plac­ing on our online lives in an increas­ingly busy world. We’re more con­nected, more engaged in par­tic­i­pa­tion in our net­works and com­mu­ni­ties, more diverse in our dis­cus­sion of views and extent to which we dis­cus them.

Most impor­tantly, the research gives the lie to the notion that being involved in social net­works makes us more iso­lated and less inclined to engage in the phys­i­cal world. Quite the reverse is true!

For me, there’s much that res­onates in the report. Rela­tion­ships that we ini­tially bro­ker online are very much extend­ing into the phys­i­cal world. For some­one like me, online and phys­i­cal world rela­tion­ships are the same thing. I dis­cern no dif­fer­ence. In fact, I feel that for peo­ple like me — who can strug­gle meet­ing and engag­ing with new peo­ple — the online world offers us a chance to over­come the intro­duc­tion and small talk hur­dles we might oth­er­wise fall at.

More iso­lated by spend­ing time online? Far from it!