In 2006 sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and
Matthew Brashears delivered grim research findings: Americans’
core discussion networks, the network of people with whom people
can discuss important matters, have shrunk and become less
diverse over the past twenty years. They found that people
depend more on a small network of home-centered kin and less on
a larger network that includes ties from voluntary groups and
neighborhoods. The authors argued that a large, unexpected
social change was responsible for this trend and suggested it
might be the rising popularity of new communication and
information technologies such as the internet and mobile phone.
Their study did not directly explore this possibility. Our
current study was designed to probe: Is people’s use of the
internet and cell phones tied to a reduction in the size and
diversity of core discussion networks and social networks more
broadly? In their paper “Social Isolation in America: Changes in
Core Discussion Networks” McPherson, Smith-