Are we alone out there?

The one sentence that stayed with me in this week's set of readings was Norman Nie's statement that "The internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than television did before it." (Prologue: The case for multimedia research, James Witte)

The television has been everyone's favorite scapegoat, blamed for the breakdown of communication in families and in general reducing our minds to mush. However, more than 50 years since televisions became ubiquitous, human beings have not turned into asocial beings incapable of talking to each other. And, while television viewing could still be largely considered passive, Web 2.0 is all about users interacting with web content and adding to and subtracting from it. It seems to me that it offers endless possibilities for building social relationships based on your interests and backgrounds.

But then I paused for thought. In my own case, I'm more of a Web 1.0 user, in that I access the knowledge on the Internet but don't contribute much to it. And the same is true of a lot of people I know. I also wonder if most of the social connections that I maintain through the Internet are not with people I would have made an effort to keep up with anyway. So while I don't think the Internet is an isolating technology, I can't be sure that the opposite is true either.

As the rest of the article says, the jury's still out on how much of an impact the Internet has made, because of the difficulty of conducting truly representative surveys. My mind hasn't been made up either.