Isolated Americans are trying to connect

This arti­cle first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=39

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060805/ap_on_re_us/lonely_nation

“Peo­ple are increas­ingly busy,” said Mar­garet Gibbs, a psy­chol­o­gist at Fair­leigh Dick­in­son Uni­ver­sity. “We’ve become a soci­ety where we expect things instantly, and don’t spend the time it takes to have real inti­macy with another person.”

This lengthy news arti­cle exam­ines a grow­ing trend in the United States — the shrink­ing social cir­cle of friends and fam­ily. Infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, and its inte­gra­tion into prod­ucts, ser­vices, and daily life, is seen as a con­tribut­ing fac­tor to this trend.

More Amer­i­cans choose to live by them­selves as a one-person house­hold. Over 27 mil­lion house­holds, or 25 per­cent of the country’s hous­ing total, fall into this cat­e­gory. In 1950, only 10 per­cent of house­holds were occu­pied by a sin­gle person.

Dante Hicks: “You hate peo­ple!“
Ran­dal Graves: “But I love gath­er­ings! Isn’t it ironic?“
Clerks, 1994

Young peo­ple rely on text mes­sag­ing, cell phones, instant mes­sag­ing, e-mail and Web sites as an alter­na­tive means of forg­ing a broad net­work like-minded acquain­tances. Face­book and MySpace are two pop­u­lar exam­ples, but both ser­vices have come under scrutiny.

The arti­cle also points out that users of these two ser­vices can link to other users as “friends”. This link­age does not mean that the user knows their online “friends well — or at all.

The text­book does not cover these online social net­works well. At the time it was printed, such net­works were an emerg­ing busi­ness. Instant mes­sag­ing (IM) was and remains a pop­u­lar ser­vice, but social net­works offer users an oppor­tu­nity to post con­tent and attract new acquaintances.

Chap­ter 13 offers some inter­est­ing points about ethics, soci­ety and infor­ma­tion sys­tems. Older peo­ple who are less famil­iar or com­fort­able with infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy find their iso­la­tion dis­turb­ing. A Boston area orga­ni­za­tion called Social Cap­i­tal Inc. is build­ing a vol­un­teer net­work on the Inter­net, to “con­nect neigh­bors” and cre­ate communities.

The effec­tive inte­gra­tion of online social net­works into local com­mu­ni­ties may reduce crime, improve edu­ca­tion, and strengthen the local econ­omy, accord­ing to Har­vard pro­fes­sor Robert Put­nam. If these effects are replic­a­ble, Hon­olulu may be a good venue for build­ing community-based online social net­works. Hon­olulu is gen­er­ally regarded as a “wired’ city, as a large per­cent­age of res­i­dents use broad­band Inter­net access. Social Capital’s busi­ness model may be appro­pri­ate and valu­able in our state.

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