No More Lonely Nights..Sang Paul McCartney
Posted: Sunday, February 15, 2009
by Gabriela Schmid
Spacelocker
"Ah, look at all the lonely people," sang the Beatles in "Eleanor Rigby".
In recent years, more Canadians are saying they have a maximum of two friends-no more than two. And people of all age groups, with the exception of women under 25, are saying this. Can it be true that working longer hours and moving more often are taking a toll on our shrinking friendship networks?
During a recent short-haul flight, White recounts passengers not even speak to their seatmates. But as soon as the plane landed and everyone could turn on their cell phones, the cabin erupted into a cacophony of one-sided conversations.
In Canada's largest urban centers, only one third of the population say they know any of their neighbors, and only about half say that they generally trust people.
In 2006 Duke University and the University of Arizona ran a study that found the number of people who have no one with whom they can have a heart-to-heart conversation nearly doubled from 1985, to 25 per cent of the population. Meanwhile, the same study found people are nurturing closer relationships with their immediate families, even as their other support networks are shrinking.
Because they move around more, "A lot of people depend on their families," says White. "You may change places, you may lose friends every two years or three years, but you can usually count on your family. In some ways, family ties are extremely important and gaining importance in a mobile society."
Canada is known for welcoming increasing numbers of immigrants. Within its borders, more people have been moving more often in recent years, says Marc-David Seidel, an associate professor of commerce at the University of British Columbia. That mobility means people are severing more ties and looking more for new social circles.
Seidel has studied the effect of friendships in the workplace, particularly on minorities, and found that who you know has a major impact on how you do.
"It increases your chance of having a high salary, it increases your bargaining power when you're negotiating," he says. "It also will increase the amount of time you stay with an organization-those that don't have friends tend to quit earlier."
There's no denying relationships are changing, White says, but is people's need for closeness and support being met? He's not convinced that our psychological well-being is any worse as a result of these shifts, but he adds that the wildcard here is technology .
"We don't know to what extent technology like BlackBerrys and so on can really maintain a friendship over time." He goes on to ask that suppose we were to email our friends back and forth and use all social sites that offer over time, and we keep at it for 10 years, and then when we finally meet each other, would we know each other? "And I can't answer that," he says.
Barry Wellman, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, counters with his argument that technology enables people to connect more through informal channels such as the grassroots mobilization that helped propel Barack Obama into the White House. If anything, he says, the Internet has encouraged regular contact with a wider, looser, web of acquaintances than before.
"People have somewhat more specialized in their relationships," says Wellman. "The people you rely on for emotional aid are different than the people you rely on for borrowing a cup of sugar or taking care of you when you're sick."
In some cases, people are using technology to shore up their real-life social reserves.
Spacelocker, the first site to call itself a social organizer, is a network of social groups and entertainment sites. The site, whose slogan is "The Happiest Space on Earth," is a single portal to a multitude of social networks.
Pamela is a new member. She joined Spacelocker to find a few friends she could "hang with and get close to, not to rack up a huge friends list". After four days, she met more than 20 people who she found to be interesting enough to consider pursuing relationships with online.
"I joined Spacelocker," she says, "because my work schedule is all over the place. I travel a lot. I don't talk much with people at work. I can't. There's too much pressure. Spacelocker lets me browse a lot of different sites so I can see who's online when it suits my schedule and check in."
"Most of the good friends I've known since we were teenagers have moved away," says Sandro, a television writer in Glasgow, Scotland, "and some of my interests just got different. My circle of friends kept shrinking."
Sandro's been a member of Spacelocker for about a month. He's met five good friends through the site and has built a friends list of about 100, but he still finds some new members are shy about admitting why they've joined.
"The mindset of some people is really funny. Some even deny that they're here to meet people," he says, laughing. "But I love people. And we're all individuals here, in it together. That's what it's about, isn't it?"
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