Has New Media Made us More Social?

Some critics believe that technology is bringing us closer together.

Keith Hampton a professor at Rutgers University states the following.  "He has studied his students and colleagues and found that students have many more close relationships because of their cellphones and media usage than the older colleagues." (Penn State University, 2015) If we examine the picture above we may think the opposite, but, what if the people in these photos are communicating with family or friends while waiting for the bus?

Now we can look at this picture.  The individuals in this photo are definitely not communicating with anyone.  Not that it's bad that they are catching up on the news, the point is that reading the news isn't communicating is collecting information.  "The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to consumers' brainpower and moral fibre." (Kutchinsky, 2014, image from article)

What do you think?  The jury is still out on this one.

References

Kutchinsky, S. (2014). Has Technology Changed Cultural Taste? The Guardian. Retrieved from

https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/2014/oct/31/-sp-technology-cultural-taste-youtube-vloggers-vice

Penn State University. (2015). Science in Our World: Certainty and Controversy. Penn State University. Retrieved from 

https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/09/16/is-technology-really-making-us-less-social/

Rawpixel image Retrieved from Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/nZeQKa625vM