Questions about the Loneliness Study

Studies

from the doesn't-add-up dept

Lots of press, which I mostly ignored, about the new study saying that people who use the internet are more lonely than others. I saw the guy behind the study on TV saying he was just trying to “alert people to the potential problem” and he struck me as someone who had no idea what he was talking about. Now Salon, among others, has started to pick apart the study to point out what’s wrong with it. The main problem being the study doesn’t consider email use to be human contact, but using a phone is. So for everyone who sends out email rather than using the phone, that’s one more person who has less human contact. While it’s a few days old, this story in Wired also makes a pretty good point about studies such as these.