Secondo uno studio citato a seguire, socializzare online toglie valore alla socializzazione faccia a faccia. Non aggiunge.
In a study at the University of Virginia, we tracked the social behavior and well-being of 174 millennials over the course of a week. At five random times each day, we sent each person a one-minute survey to complete on their mobile phone. We asked what they had been doing in the previous 15 minutes, including whether they were socializing in person or digitally (such as by texting or using social media). We also asked how close or distant they were feeling to other people, and how good or bad they were feeling overall.
We weren’t particularly surprised to find that people felt better and more connected during times when they only socialized face-to-face, as compared with when they weren’t socializing at all. This fit with decades of existing research. We didn’t find any benefits of digital socializing over not socializing at all, though our study wasn’t designed to explore that distinction.
We did find, however, that when socializing face-to-face only, people felt happier and more connected to others than when they were socializing only through their phones. This is notable because the people in our study were the generation of so-called “digital natives,” who had been using smartphones, tablets and computers to interact since very young ages. Even for them, the benefits gleaned from good old face-to-face talking exceeded the well-being of digitally mediated communication.
Most critically, people felt worse and less connected when they mixed face-to-face with digital socializing, compared to when they solely socialized in person. Our results suggest that digital socializing doesn’t add to, but in fact subtracts from, the psychological benefits of nondigital socializing.
Kostadin Kushlev
via Giuseppe Fattori