{"id":23338,"date":"2018-03-06T10:29:23","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T15:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/?p=23338"},"modified":"2022-03-16T12:09:51","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T16:09:51","slug":"social-media-face-to-face-interactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/social-media-face-to-face-interactions\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media Does Not Displace Face-to-Face Social Interactions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Contrary to popular belief, <\/span>recent research<\/span><\/a> suggests that social media is not replacing face-to-face contact with family and friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study is published in <\/span>Information, Communication & Society<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fears of Social Displacement<\/b><\/h2>\n

For many years, people have worried that social media is replacing human contact. Supporters of this belief poked at the irony: despite its ability to connect people from all over the world, social media makes people more lonely. They cried out the idea of \u201csocial displacement\u201d — the alienation of people from friends and family in favor of Facebook and Twitter. <\/span><\/p>\n

A team of researchers from the University of Kansas, led by <\/span>Jeffrey Hall<\/span><\/a>, associate professor of communication studies at the university,<\/span> set out to check if this commonly held belief is supported by facts. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>I study the intersection between digital media and everyday talk,\u201d Hall told The University Network (TUN). \u201cThere is a very persistent idea that when new media become adopted, they are hurting our social relationships. Although there isn\u2019t a lot of good research to support it, it is a widely held belief. I sought data to test it.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Hall and two of his then-doctoral students — Mike Kearney<\/span> and Chong Xing —<\/span> conducted<\/span> two tests, one long-term and one short-term. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m trying to push back on the popular conception of how this works,\u201d Hall said in a statement. \u201cThat\u2019s not to say overuse of social media is good, but it\u2019s not bad in the way people think it is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Long-Term Study<\/b><\/h2>\n

The team compared data sets from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (<\/span>LSAY<\/span><\/a>) from 2009 and 2011, tracking adults who were born during the \u201870s and \u201880s, right in the middle of Generation X. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was really convenient was the questions about social media use were asked right when Facebook was hitting its inflection point of adoption, and the main adopters in that period were Gen Xers,\u201d Hall said in a statement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the common belief, the researchers did not find a correlation between decrease in people\u2019s direct social interactions, such as visiting friends, talking on the phone and attending group meetings (other than religious groups), and increased use of social media. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not the case at all that social media adoption or use had a consistent effect on their direct social interactions with people,\u201d Hall said in a statement.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was interesting was that, during a time of really rapid adoption of social media, and really powerful changes in use, you didn\u2019t see sudden declines in people\u2019s direct social contact,\u201d he continued. \u201cIf the social-displacement theory is correct, people should get out less and make fewer of those phone calls, and that just wasn\u2019t the case.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Short-Term Study<\/b><\/h2>\n

In the second study, which was designed by the researchers and carried out in 2015, the researchers collected their own data. After recruiting 116 people (split evenly between adults and college students), they texted the participants five times a day for five consecutive days, asking them each time about their use of social media and direct social contacts in the previous 10 minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Again, the researchers found no <\/span>relationship between people\u2019s use of social med<\/span>ia earlier in the day and their social interactions <\/span>l<\/span>ater that day. Just because people used social media earlier that day didn\u2019t mean they were more likely to be alone later. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhether or not people are using social media throughout the day tells us nearly nothing about whether they are having face-to-face social interactions with close friends and family,\u201d Hall told TUN. \u201cThey appear to be unrelated phenomena.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hall suspects that<\/span> people may have shifted time spent previously on older forms of media, such as reading newspaper, browsing the internet, or watching TV, to social media, but that was not part of the study. <\/span><\/p>\n

Future Study<\/b><\/h2>\n

Hall is planning on studying whether abstaining from social media actually causes change in our daily well-being and loneliness.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contrary to popular belief, recent research suggests that social media is not replacing face-to-face contact with family and friends. The study is published in Information, Communication & Society. Fears of Social Displacement For many years, people have worried that social media is replacing human contact. Supporters of this belief poked at the irony: despite its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":45520,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[232,624,230,229,509,243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","category-relationships","category-news","category-lead-stories","category-university-of-kansas","category-health"],"aioseo_notices":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions.jpg",830,533,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions-224x144.jpg",224,144,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions-300x193.jpg",300,193,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions.jpg",830,533,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions.jpg",830,533,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions.jpg",830,533,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions.jpg",830,533,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Hyeyeun Jeon","author_link":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/author\/hyeyeun-jeon\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Contrary to popular belief, recent research suggests that social media is not replacing face-to-face contact with family and friends. The study is published in Information, Communication & Society. Fears of Social Displacement For many years, people have worried that social media is replacing human contact. Supporters of this belief poked at the irony: despite its…","featured_media_src_url":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Social-Media-Does-Not-Displace-Face-To-Face-Social-Interactions.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}