Time wasters - all of them!

Facebook. Twitter, MySpace, Cell phones, Blogs, iParentnetwork....

Time wasters. Time thieves.  At least that is how the media has sometimes portrayed them.  Not real.  Online friends?  Get serious.  That's not really human contact.  Those are trivial connections that take up time that we could be spent with our real friends, right?  Those using social media, such as iParentnetwork, are the lonely folks, the isolated.  Social media must adds to that sense of isolation.

Nope.

A recent study fromthe Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled "Social Isolation and New Technology" published last fall, suggests the opposite is true.  Social media make actually make you MORE SOCIAL and MORE INVOLVED, not LESS.

Ok, all you naysayers out there.  What do you think?  According to lead researcher Keith Hampton, Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, "Social media users still tend to know just as many of their neighbors as non-users, and they are more, rather than less, likely to be involved in community groups, and much more likely to frequent social settings such as cafes and public parks." 

Researchers in the Pew Study questioned a random sample of 2,512 people in the summer of 2008 about whether they used social media, how much, and how it affected their personal and communal lives.  Exactly what did they mean by  staying in touch?  The Pew Study let participants define it.  Hampton describes the method: 'Give us a list of names,' we said, 'of people you consider to be especially significant in your life,' and social media users had bigger lists.

Discussion networks were 12 percent larger among users of mobile phones and 9 percent larger for those who share photos online or who use instant messaging.  People's core networks -- their closest and most significant confidants -- tended to be 25 percent more diverse (containing both family and non-family) for mobile-phone users, 15 percent for basic-internet users.  Personal networks grew the more people used the Internet, instant messaging and other media.

Those who uploaded photos were 61 percent more likely to have discussion partners across political lines.  Maintaining a blog was linked with a higher liklihood of having a cross-race discussion partner.  And those who used the Internet a lot were 53 percent more likely than non-users to have contacts across race lines.

So from all this data, the conclusion I draw is that social networking isn't a way to escape from our real connections and it certainly isn't a time waster at all.  It is through social networking that we learn to embrace other's viewpoints, a place to network and to enlarge our world...even if we are doing it from our comfy couch in the quiet corner of Connecticut.

What do you think?  Do you view social networking as a waste of time or have you found it to be beneficial?