I was reading an article that dealt with what the repercussions would be regarding a complete shutdown of the internet across the United States. They aren’t pretty. I then read the report from pewinternet.org that had some interesting insights, but this is the one snippet that stood out for me:
During a catastrophic event such as the one mentioned above, would the lack of online social interaction become a detriment to face-to-face interaction, especially among neighbors?
This question is not meant to be a slam against social media technology in general. I use it quite extensively myself and can say anecdotally that it hasn’t impaired my real facetime with other people. I’m just genuinely curious about whether or not a huge change-up in social interaction would provide interesting effects or not.
Conversely it could just as easily be the case that the social media people are not neighborly with their “real life” neighbors because they don’t fall along congruent social or political lines with the people they live close to. In other words, the socializing online is because they CAN’T socialize easily with their neighbors, not because they don’t want to be social in real life.
Without a true study, there’s no way to know what it really is, and with a blanket statement like that, it’s likely to be quite a lot of different things.