Does Social Media Connect or Isolate?

Prof. Haamer held a lecture on student convention about the impact of urbanization to human interaction and pointed out a peculiar find from a study on the Victorian society: a research indicated that while people lived in the farms they visited their neighbors roughly five times a week but when the same families moved to settle in barracks and work in the factory they visited their neighbors roughly five times in two months. Then the professor asked: was a distance a connector or separator and offered his view that sometimes a bit of distance supports the human interaction. I came across a similar theme in the paper by the scholars from the University of Pennsylvania and the Pew Internet Project called “Social Isolation and New Technology” that tries to challenge that theory and claims that Internet has no or but a little-positive impact on human interaction.
The study does not cover the quality of those interactions but claims amongst else that the ones who maintain a blog are more adapt to confide in someone who is of another race and that the social network of the Facebook users in particular is broader. I personally do not see the interaction between the maintaining a blog (unidirectional communication) and social dialogue but who am I to argue ;)
The findings support the claim that Internet and ICT in general enlarges ones social networking quality and scope but there was also some evidence that the use of social networking services (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) substitutes for some level of neighborhood involvement e.g. the users of social networking services are 30% less likely to know at least some neighbors.
In my opinion this was an interesting study and I do agree with the authors that while ICT solutions strengthen and help to maintain our social network one can not solely rely on the Internet based social networking services.