Lonely People Spend More Time On Facebook – Study Reveals
“Compared to non-lonely people, lonely people spend more time on Facebook. Lonely individuals who are shy or have low social support may turn to Facebook to compensate for their lack of social skills and/or social networks in face-to-face settings,” explains Hayeon Song, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee USA.
The professor statement sharply contradicts a popular belief that social media sites are making people feel more isolated. Instead Song says, people who are already lonely, are turning to social media in search for friends.
This conclusion was reached after a research team set out to study the relationship between the time one spends on Facebook and how lonely one is. The study findings reveal that the lonelier the person, the more time that person will spend on Facebook.
The point being driven home here by Professor Song is that lonely people spend more time on the internet, and correcting the initial internet study that suggested the internet is making people lonely. He says:
“The interesting point of this study is that it both supports and corrects the original internet study, which is one of the most influential studies in internet research and was produced by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University.
To the question of whether or not the internet increases psychological dysfunctions such as loneliness, the internet study suggested that internet use has detrimental effects. Our study supports this in that internet use is associated with loneliness.
However, we found the previously suggested causal direction to be erroneous: lonely people spend more time on the internet rather than internet use making people lonely,” concluded Professor Song.
