Globe Article Suggests Social Media Strengthening Friendships

Earlier this decade, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone indicted the television as one of the primary culprits for declining social capital. Then in 2006 the study, "Social Isolation in America" indicated that the number of Americans who are socially isolated, with zero or just one close confidante, roughly doubled over a 20 year period to 43%. This study's authors also implicated technology as one of the causes for the diminishing number of close friends Americans have today. Both works raised interesting questions about how Internet based technologies would impact social capital and friendships.

Social networking sites have raised the social capital stakes to another level in recent years. First MySpace, then Facebook and now Twitter have experienced rapid growth and consume a good deal of users' time. My own early dabbling with these sites and my own cooking blog led me to think at best this technology might be a neutral factor, especially on the issue of close friendships. It's nice that I can swap recipes with someone in Australia, but my blogging "friend" isn't going to bring me chicken soup if I get sick.

But as I've witnessed the evolution of social networking sites, and considered SCI's experience with the commercial sites and our own community portals, I've sensed there could be something more afoot here. Today's Boston Globe article on Social Media was thus very interesting, offering many anecdotes about how people are leveraging these technologies to deepen relationships with friends by keeping abreast of their doings and helping to organize the impromptu gatherings that are vital to real friendships. And of course, there is this week backdrop of how people have been leveraging their social networking site enabled relationships to quickly organize the Iranian protest movement. A compelling example about how relationships established perhaps first on a purely social basis can then be turned into action when an issue calls for it.

At SCI, we have all along had a strategy of blending online resources and in-person activities as a way to strengthen local relationships, and today's article suggests this type of blending is happening on a wide scale with social media. I like to relate the story of how we used our web tools to introduce an isolated elderly man to neighbor who volunteered to snowblow his driveway. Our surveys also suggest that over half of the people subscribing to our e-newsletters and using our websites have met new community members as a result of activities they have learned about online.

Of course, we are very early in the development of social media, but it is certainly a hopeful sign that these tools could ultimately serve to strengthen our bonds with friends and neighbors, in a world where these ties are very much needed.