The Office for National Statistics has just reported that “over the last two dec- ades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group. For the first time in our history a third of the adults in this country live alone, a trend that looks set to continue.

Britain’s disinclination for togetherness is only equalled by her veneration of com- municating through new technologies. The rapid proliferation of electronic media is now making private space available in almost every sphere of the individual’s life. Yet this is now the most significant contributing factor to society’s growing physical estrangement. Whether in or out of the home, more people of all ages in the UK are physically and socially disengaged from the people around them because they are wearing earphones, talking or texting on a mobile telephone, or using a laptop or Blackberry.

Aric Sigman in the February 2009 issue of The Biologist

The article basically follows the line of ‘People are on computers all the time and not talking to each other face to face, therefore they’re all lonely, and loneliness kills you’. Actually, I find the link between loneliness and biological defects really interesting, but I have a problem with the computers bit. The entire article is based on a premise that social interaction through computers doesn’t count. That friendship and interaction through the web isn’t proper interaction.

Anna Pickard covered this rather well last month in Virtual People, Real Friends:

Call me naive, but far from being the bottomless repository of oddballs and potential serial killers, the internet is full of lively minded, like-minded engaging people – for the first time in history we’re lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. The friends I have now might be spread wide, geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by about a million miles.

That’s not the end of the matter, of course. Naturally, society is a rather more varied, complex beast. Anna, and I and, well, likely most of the people reading this blog are at the leading edge of social utopia. We’re well connected to our optimal friends through the net, so much so that we’ve come out the other side and all know each other face-to-face as well.

My feeling is that, in terms of potential, anyone connected to the net can do what we’ve done. Meet their right friends, people more socially stimulating and brilliant than you’d ever find by limiting your face to the faces of people in the street. I think it’s natural and normal that those friends met virtually will become friends known physically, and this whole misguided inference of ‘Facebook causes cancer’ falls down. These are short sighted observations of people who don’t want to be involved in this generation of humanity. That’s their call. But by only observing, they fail to see that after the initial social disruption caused by the explosive growth of the social web, everything picks up again better than it ever would have been in the first place.