"The paper, published in the journal PNAS on Monday, asserts that the health effects of active online social lives largely mirror the benefits of busy offline social lives.
“We find that people with more friends online are less likely to die than their disconnected counterparts,” the paper says. “This evidence contradicts assertions that social media have had a net-negative impact on health.”
The study’s methods are detailed at length in the paper, and it was approved by three university and state review boards. But skeptics will note that Facebook itself was closely involved with the paper...
The study was based on 12 million social media profiles made available to the researchers by Facebook, as well as records from the California Department of Health.
It found that “moderate use” of Facebook was associated with the lowest mortality rate, and that receiving friend requests correlated with reduced mortality, but that sending friend requests did not.
Mr. Hobbs and the paper’s other authors matched records from California’s Department of Public Health with those of California Facebook users, preserving privacy by aggregating the data before analyzing it, the release said. All of the subjects of the study were born from 1945 to 1989...
"All of the conceptual and linguistic back flips being done here in trying to explain that the virtual world interacts with the real world could be circumvented by instead taking for granted that digital connection is new and different but that it’s also part of this one social reality,” Mr.Jurgenson wrote."
I believe this; I feel like I keep on having conversations about how real and valid our online-based relationships are. It's not the 90s era friendships with people you javelin never met in person who you only know as a username, it's people you have met but who just aren't in your daily life enough for daily interactions to nourish a full friendship . (And, I'm sure that those 90s-style friendships can be nourishing too, I'm just irritated by the way that popular conception of the internet sometimes seems trapped in myths from 10+ years ago about how rewarding Internet was just predators and bullying ) .
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