How has the web affected your social relationships?

A recent survey by The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center shows that out of 895 tech stakeholders and critics interviewed, over 85 percent believe that their lives have been improved by the web, and that this will continue over the course of the next decade.

According to the article, respondents include everyone from Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, to folks from top universities and government agencies, as well as companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Yahoo, Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson Research, Nokia and The New York Times.

What I found really interesting in the article is the response of Tim Marema, vice president of the Center for Rural Strategies, who says that:

“The Internet helps me maintain contact with a greater number of people. But it also makes it easier for me to retreat within a form-fitted political, religious, or social landscape. It’s when we find ways to work with people with whom we disagree that society progresses. The internet makes it easier for me to avoid disagreement and compromise and encourages me to become more strident and polarized in my views. That’s a problem.”

This immediately made me remember Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough in which the author reflects on how media fragmentation increases the political, ideological, social and religious cleavage between people.

Just as people in Manjoo’s book who find the mainstream media biased will flee to news sources that reinforce their personal views, so too does Tim Marema retreat into a small form-fitted group of people on the Internet, those with whom he holds similar views.

I know I am like Tim Marema. I shy away from blog posts, Tweets and Facebook status updates that I find controversial. I believe in the FACTS I hold, and will find it hard to believe that the other person refuses to see things my way, which is the only way! Therefore, I would click away from such profiles and go look for those that are more in consonance with my previously held views. Call it biased assimilation, but that is the world we live in. Sadder too, is that fact that I would avoid meeting or engaging in a conversation with such people in the real world, because of the relationship we have (or do not have) on the web.

While the survey states that respondents where all technology experts and web enthusiasts, I believe the questions asked in the survey are relevant to everyone who uses the web.

So, I leave you all with this question: ‘In 2020, when you look at the big picture and consider your personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, do you see that the Internet has mostly been a positive or negative force on your social world?’

To read the article in full, please click http://tinyurl.com/2e6zapy