Given the huge increase in popularity of Social Networking, could sites such as Facebook be making us less social?
Today’s societies consist of both localised and distributed tribes linked by numerous advanced forms of communication that transcend both real and virtual worlds. In the last 20 years we’ve experienced a rapid evolution with many new forms of Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) being used for social and relational purposes (Katz, Rice, Acord, Dasgupta, & David, 2004; Kavanaugh, Reese, Reese, Carroll, & Rosson, 2005). Primarily based around the Internet, these new forms of communication include technologies such as web-pages, blogs, newsgroups, forums, bulletin boards, chat lines, Multiple User Dungeons (MUDs) and Multi-user-dungeon Object Oriented (MOOs). Much of the earliest forms of CMC socialisation were based around e-mail (Finholt & Sproull, 1990), however in the last five years its been the exponential uptake of Social Networking Services (SNS) by mainstream society, (Ofcom, 2008) that has authorities (Kirby, 2009) and academics most concerned (Heim, 1992, 2009; Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010).
