Isolation In Real Life By Lisa Rapaport Summary

Lisa Rapaport’s article for Reuters.com entitled “Social media linked to feelings of isolation in real life – study” reports a fairly comprehensive summary of the findings of a study lead by Dr. Brian Primack. This news article comes with a tagline about how young adults using more social media may feel more isolated in daily lives, and begins with this same sentiment. After briefly listing social media sites that could be related to isolation and giving a definition, “when a person lacks a sense of belonging, connections,” Rapaport throws out that people using two hours of social media a day reported double the social isolation of people using less than half an hour. The article clearly states that the study does not prove the link that they

Picking out the emphasis of the study and reporting on the possibility of a causation relationship gives a misleading premise to the otherwise well summarized article, priming the reader to interpret the correlation as perhaps more explanatory than it actually is. The choice to emphasize quotes from Primack about exercising caution and self-monitoring use are likely to give a bit of sensational tone to the findings, and to cause concern. Despite this nudge to take the results as a place for advice, Rapaport does do a particularly good job at pointing out that nothing has been proved and that other explanations should be considered. Although she briefly quotes Dr. Shakya on saying that there are shown to be some positive correlations between social media use and close relationships, she seems to emphasize more so that there are other reasons that lonely people would be using social media. Rapaport’s article does not fall into the mistake of over-attributing causation and proof to the study, but it does omit the numbers of the actual findings in such a way that can mislead readers. While the points about double and triple odds of increased perceived social isolation are drawn directly from the research article, the tables show that the numbers are very close together. The difference between 3.4 and 1.8 and 1.2 and 2.0 sounds much more dramatic when put in terms of tripled and doubled, and readers would benefit from having the numbers to be sure what exactly was being multiplied. Rapaport does provide a clear summary of the process and the findings, and includes important limitations and drawbacks of the study, making this article an effective report on the study while a bit biased towards over-emphasizing social media’s