Download Matthew “Alex” Cooper CSC 540 4/29/11 Does Social Media Lead

Matthew “Alex” Cooper
CSC 540
4/29/11
Does Social Media Lead to Social Isolation
The term social media describe as defined by searchenginepartner.com is a “media that is posed
by the user and can take many different forms. Some types of social media are forums, message boards,
blogs, wikis and podcasts. Social media applications include Google, Facebook and YouTube.” I will
add MMORPG's to this mix as many people communicate exclusively with others in a make believe
fantasy world.
As we become more connected are we drifting into social isolation? For example, the telephone
was invented to increase contact with family, friends, and work relations, especially to help overcome
physical distance. Nevertheless, telephone users found themselves less likely to visit in person, even if
they lived close enough for face-to-face visits. Telephone use increased, while personal visits
decreased, and people began substituting personal visits with telephone calls. Therefore, questions
arose about whether the telephone would actually alter the quality of social relationships and isolate
people. Television also had a big effect on people's social life. When the television was first invented
people found themselves able to enjoy their nights and weekends engrossing themselves in make
believe stories played out by professional actors. It was the first time that people could be actively
engaged in an event for very long periods of time, while getting a synthetic feel of human interaction.
Now we have the Internet, which combines the advantages of the television and the telephone into one.
People are able to get their entertainment and social communication in one place. But are people
depriving themselves of such necessary human contact or is the Internet a viable tool for
communication and entertainment. Researchers argue that, despite its convenience and easy
accessibility today, the Internet in essence is a weak medium for information exchange (especially
emotional and affective information) and thus decreases the quality of interpersonal relationships and
causes negative psychological outcomes.
Let's begin our discussion with a longitudinal study done by Kraut, who sampled 93 families
and 256 members in eight communities in Pittsburgh. These families were chosen because they had no
prior experience with computers nor the Internet. Because they had no prior experience the researchers
were able to pretest their social habits and psychological well-being. The users were given powerful
home computers and after 12-24 months were they were tested again to measure their social
involvement and psychological well-being. The results from this study showed that greater Internet use
caused a small but significant decline in social involvement, and an increase in loneliness and
depression. This study split computer users into two different types of groups: those who used the
computer for non-social use and those who used the Internet for social use. People who used the
Internet for non-social reasons developed great technique and skills in using the computer but it
consumed a lot of their time they could have used to socialize with their friends and family. The social
users of the Internet experienced two other underlying mechanisms which would explain why they
were also susceptible to such psychological results. The first one being time displacement. This one is
self-explanatory, it basically means the time people spend on the Internet is time they could be
spending with their friends or loved ones. The other mechanism was that people were displacing
online weak ties with strong ties. Weak ties are are associated with infrequent contact and narrow
focus which were easy to break. Strong ties are relationships maintained by close physical proximity,
frequent contact and sense of obligation and affection. According to Kraut, although people maintain
strong ties electronically, many online relationships were new and weak. “By using the Internet, people
are substituting poorer quality social relationships for better quality relationships”. However, these
findings may be misleading. One of the populations measured in the survey were families with high
school students. Over the elapsed time of pretesting and final testing it may be that the children had
gone to college. The parents may have found themselves to be more lonely as well as the children in
college, lacking adequate social skills to properly adapt to college life. The children may have found
themselves attracted to the Internet because of their loneliness in the first place. The other sample
population was adult family members on the Board of Directors of local community development
organizations. This group was perceived to have already been highly connected to their peers at the
time they were given computers. Over the next few years, their decrease in social contact may have
been a reflection of their inevitable decrease of involvement with their community. Another challenge
to this survey is that Internet may have had a novelty effect on the people surveyed. Meaning that
because the Internet was so new, they found themselves enthralled with it.
Now, let's explore the effects of gaming and how people become addicted to the Internet
through this medium. You may think that this is irrelevant to the topic of this paper. One may say
gaming addiction is a different problem than online loneliness, but it's important to note that on top of
the addiction they are still going through the Internet to feed their gaming addiction, thus relying on the
Internet for their communication. Think about the difference between staying up all night playing
poker with your friends, and playing poker all night with anonymous people. All addictions (whether
chemical or behavioral) are essentially about constant rewards and reinforcement . Addictive behavior
can be defined as any behavior that features all the core components of addiction (salience, mood
modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and relapse).
Any behavior (for example, video game playing) that fulfills the six criteria below can be
operationally defined as an addiction. In the case of video game addiction this would be:
(1) Salience – This occurs when video game play becomes the most important activity in the
person’s life and dominates their thinking (per-occupations and cognitive distortions), feelings
(cravings) and behavior (deterioration of socialized behavior). For instance, even if the person is not
actually playing on a video game they will be thinking about the next time that they will be.
(2) Mood modification – This refers to the subjective experiences that people report as a
consequence of engaging in video game play and can be seen as a coping strategy (i.e. they experience
an arousing “buzz” or a “high” or, paradoxically, a tranquillizing feel of “escape” or “numbing”).
(3) Tolerance – This is the process whereby increasing amounts of video game play are required
to achieve the former mood modifying effects. This basically means that for someone engaged in video
game playing, they gradually build up the amount of time they spend online engaged in the behavior.
(4) Withdrawal symptoms – These are the unpleasant feeling states and/or physical effects that
occur when video game play is discontinued or suddenly reduced, for example, the shakes, moodiness,
and irritability.
(5) Conflict – This refers to the conflicts between the video game player and those around them
(interpersonal conflict), conflicts with other activities (job, schoolwork, social life, hobbies and
interests) or from within the individual themselves (intrapsychic conflict and/or subjective feelings of
loss of control) which are concerned with spending too much time engaged in video game play.
(6) Relapse – This is the tendency for repeated reversions to earlier patterns of video game play
to recur and for even the most extreme patterns typical at the height of excessive video game play to be
quickly restored after periods of abstinence or control.
In online gaming, there is no end to the game and there is the potential for players to play
endlessly against, or with other real people. This can be immensely rewarding and psychologically
engrossing. For a small minority of people, this may lead to an addiction where online gaming becomes
the single most important thing in that person’s life and which compromises all other activities.
Simulated environments also allow players to experiment with other parts of their personality, for
example, gender swapping, that would be difficult to do offline. Recent research has also shown that
around a third of online gamers make good friends in the game.
Now let's consider if the Internet induces loneliness or if lonely people are attracted to the
Internet, or maybe a recursive mixture of both. Lonely and depressed individuals turn out to have
higher preference for online interaction, since they perceive that online communication might be the
‘‘Prozac of social communication,’’ relatively less risky and easier than face-to-face communication
because of its greater anonymity. As they devote more time and attention to their online social
interaction, some people have a hard time regulating their Internet use, which is termed compulsive
use. Compulsive use in turn leads to negative life outcomes such as lower academic grades, missing
class or work, and missing a social engagement.
According to Davis, loneliness plays a role as a distal cause of problematic Internet usage
(PIU). This is because when lonely people are not successful with their offline interactions, they
attribute their failure to their lack of social skills, which increases PIU in turn. Loneliness should also
directly influence preferences for online interaction, since lonely individuals feel that they can interact
with others and express themselves better online than they do offline.
Individuals who are lonely and use the Internet to compensate their deficient social skills might
experience negative life outcomes (e.g., harming other significant activities such as work, school, or
significant relationships) instead of relieving their existing problems. It suggests that individuals who
are not psychosocially healthy (e.g., are lonely) have difficulty not only maintaining healthy social
interaction in their real lives but also regulating their Internet use. Moreover, these individuals end up
adding additional problems to their lives besides their loneliness. The increased problems might drive
them to rely more on their favorite online activity as a means to diminish or escape from their
augmented troubles, which could isolate them and increase loneliness more.
This pattern suggests a potential malicious cycle of unregulated Internet use if not moderated.
From the multigroup analysis comparing three favorite online activities in the hypothesized model with
loneliness as an outcome, downloading turned out to be the most problematic in that only its outcomes
were significantly related to loneliness. It is the entertainment applications of the Internet rather than
social ones that perhaps pose the greatest threat to the well-being of its users. So, some social uses of
the Internet may be quite harmless even if they interfere somewhat with real-world activities.
Let's zoom in on secondary school students to see how the Internet affects them. Results show
that the secondary school students who reported greater hours of engagement on the Internet have
higher loneliness levels than the average users. Considering the results of the present study, it is
obvious that the secondary school students using Internet excessively feel themselves lonelier than
those using Internet less. This result shows consistency with the results of other studies made within
this scope. However, at different age groups, e.g. in a study in which adults are involved, it was stated
that greater use of the Internet as a communication tool was associated with a lower level of social
loneliness. In contrast, greater use of the Internet to find new people was associated with a higher level
of emotional loneliness.
Beside this main purposive result of the study, the analysis showed that the average usage of
Internet of the secondary school students per week was 15 hours. This weekly amount of usage does
not point to excessive use. Further, there were the students of whose weekly Internet usage reaches 84
hours (12 hours of usage daily) among them who joined in the study. In a research carried out on ten
patients who were diagnosed with Internet addiction, it was seen that the patients spare their time with
using Internet about 7-8 hours everyday. Considering these standards, it is required to make more
extended studies on secondary school students about Internet addiction. Beside these studies, the school
consultants and teachers should be more aware of and be informed about Internet addiction and
precautions to be taken.
Let's consider a study done on university students. This study investigated whether university
students’ levels of loneliness, depression, and computer self-efficacy were significant predictors of their
problematic Internet use levels. The study was carried out with 559 Turkish university students. The
research data were analyzed by multiple regression analysis. The findings indicated that loneliness,
depression, and computer self-efficacy were significant predictors of problematic Internet use.
Loneliness was found as the most important predictive variable. Depression predicted problematic
Internet use on the second rank, and computer self-efficacy on the third rank. The participants were 559
university students attending Anadolu University in Turkey. The data were obtained from 322 (57.6%)
female and 234 (41.9%) male students, and 3 individuals who did not state their gender (0.5%).
Problematic Internet Use Scale (PIUS). The PIUS is a Likert-type scale (7 ,strongly agree, 1, strongly
disagree) developed with Turkish students by Ceyhan and Gurcan. According to the scale, higher scores
mean that individuals report unhealthy use of the Internet.
The findings from this study shows that loneliness, depression, and computer self-efficacy were
all important predictors of PIU behavior. It is also seen that there was a low level of relationship
between them. These three variables explained 27.9% of total variance related to PIU. The variable of
loneliness explained 21.8% of total variance alone and appeared to be the most important predictor as a
variable. Depression, the second important variable that predicted PIU behavior, explained only 3.3%
of total variance alone. The third variable, computer self-efficacy, explained only 2.8% of the total
variance alone.
The findings revealed that the variables of loneliness, depression, and computer self-efficacy
were important predictors of PIU, and loneliness was the most important predictor. Based on this result,
it can be stated that individuals experiencing the feeling of loneliness tend to have more PIU behavior.
Moreover, as the levels of depression and computer self-efficacy increase, the PIU behaviors of
individuals do as well. These findings of the present study support the cognitive-behavioral model of
PIU.
It was also revealed in this study that depression was less predictive of problematic Internet use
than loneliness. This finding is also consistent with the finding that while loneliness played an
important role in the development of problematic Internet use, depression had little influence on the
process.
In conclusion, we see that it's impossible to gauge whether loneliness leads to problematic
Internet usage or if problematic Internet usage leads to loneliness. This is the case with most things in
psychology, because when a relationship has the ability of being recursive, it's almost the same as
asking if the chicken or the egg came first. It is obvious that compulsive use of the Internet has the
strongest correlation to negative outcomes, which may lead to loneliness. So be conscious of how your
computer habits affect your life, and take necessary steps to adjust yourself. The Internet can be an
addictive tool, don't let it control your life.
References
Ceyhan, A., & Ceyhan, E. (2008). Loneliness, Depression, and Computer Self-Efficacy as Predictors of
Problematic Internet Use. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11(6), 699-701. doi:10.1089/cpb.2007.0255
Deniz, L. (2010). Excessive Internet Use and Loneliness Among Secondary School Students. Journal
of Instructional Psychology, 37(1), 20-23. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Junghyun, K., LaRose, R., & Wei, P. (2009). Loneliness as the Cause and the Effect of Problematic
Internet Use: The Relationship between Internet Use and Psychological Well-Being. CyberPsychology
& Behavior, 12(4), 451-455. doi:10.1089/cpb.2008.0327
Griffiths, M. (2010). Online video gaming: what should educational psychologists know?. Educational
Psychology in Practice, 26(1), 35-40. doi:10.1080/02667360903522769
Mu, H. (2007). Social use of the internet and loneliness. Informally published manuscript,
Department of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Newark, Ohio. Retrieved from
http://etd.ohiolink.edu/send-pdf.cgi/Hu%20Mu.pdf?osu1186168233