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New Scientist
March 7, 2009
Facebook is good for you;
Do social networking sites, or the internet generally, cause
loneliness and poor health? If anything it's the reverse, says
Michael Marshall
BYLINE: Michael Marshall.
Michael Marshall is a journalist and producer on the New Scientist website and has 470 friends on
Facebook
SECTION: COMMENT AND ANALYSIS; Comment and Analysis; Pg. 22-23
LENGTH: 383 words
IT STARTED with an article in the journal Biologist (vol 56, p 14) by the psychologist Aric Sigman. He
argued that the increasing use of electronic media was causing a decrease in face-to-face social contact.
Given that loneliness and isolation are linked to an increased risk of illness and death, might the internet and
social networking sites be a health risk?
Inevitably, this was misreported as "How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer", which Sigman
rightly condemned. But while his article gives much evidence for the well-established link between loneliness
and illness, it offers none at all to support the idea that internet use causes loneliness.
That could be because using the internet and social networking sites actually appears to reduce
loneliness and improve well-being, as was reported as long ago as 2002 in the Journal of Social Issues (vol
58, p 49). People who have difficulties with conventional socialising, such as those with Asperger's
syndrome, experience great benefits (New Scientist , 30 June 2007, p 26). As for social networking sites
being a poor alternative to real-world socialising, surveys reported at a conference in 2006 (DOI:
10.1145/1180875.1180901) indicate that Facebook users mostly use it to maintain relationships with people
they meet offline.
The most recent warning about the ills of social networking came from the neuroscientist Susan
Greenfield, speaking in the UK's House of Lords. Greenfield argued that science needs to answer two
questions: why are social networking sites growing, and what features of the young mind, if any, are being
threatened by them?
These are perfectly reasonable questions, which are being addressed. Unfortunately, Greenfield then
recited several scary anecdotes, none of them backed up by research, and suggested that the internet might
be behind the rise of ADHD over the last 30 years. True, ADHD is linked to "internet addiction" (Journal of
Adolescent Health , vol 41, p 93), but it is unclear which causes which. What's more, internet addiction is not
the same thing as internet use.
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