"All the lonely people - where do they all come from?" An Australian study can't answer where they come from, but does know where the lonely go: the Internet.Luigi Bonetti, Dr. Mary Anne Campbell, and Dr. Linda Gillmore of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia set out to answer the modern equivalency of the chicken-and-egg question -- does the Internet make people more lonely, or do lonely people turn to the Internet for solace? The researchers discovered the answer: lonely people communicate online significantly more than non-lonely people do.
As phrased in the study, the youth aged 10 to 16 "who self-identified as lonely communicated online significantly more than those who self-reported being socially anxious. The former also indicated that they communicated online significantly more frequently about personal things, people in their everyday lives, intimate topics, and their present and past, in comparison to socially anxious and typically developing children and adolescents."
Why was this? As per the study, lonely youth "value the Internet as a communicative 'protected' environment in which they can better express their inner selves and find conversation more satisfying than they do offline." A comparison could be made between the Internet in this usage and the classroom theories of Maria Montessori, which posited that the creation of a small, self-controllable environment (or microcosm) contributed to students being able to, as Wikipedia phrases it, "produce... a small self-running children's world" to engender a sense of empowerment and self-actualization. A similar effect of self-actualization in the microcosmic environment is seen with lonely young people on the Internet - the study "indicated that [the lonely young people] communicated online more frequently so they did not feel as shy, were able to talk more comfortably, and dared to say more."
One odd aspect of the study was the choice to establish a three-factored landscape of sorts: loneliness, social anxiety, and typical development. While the factors are certainly independent, the study seems to overlook their interdependence - the ways that social anxiety can contribute to loneliness, or that loneliness can be a factor in typical development. Indeed, it may be a sort of existential loneliness, the hunger to connect with other people, that drives significant social development in youth and gives them the motivation to overcome their anxieties in order to form bonds with other people. The study also did not address whether the Internet, as a microcosm of the larger social world, enabled the socially-awkward and lonely teens to connect with other people more effectively in offline environments, or whether the youth began to rely primarily upon the online setting to connect with other people.
For its flaws, the study by the Australian researchers provides a good preliminary answer to a question that underscores social media in all its forms. Perhaps the explosion in popularity of social media over the last decade has been in part to a sort of epidemic of loneliness. In response, social media sites like Facebook may have become more and more perfect microcosms for lonely people to safely connect with each other.
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