Research by many people (most importantly Keith Hampton) show again and again that Internet/Facebook users are less isolated than people who don’t use social media. ... What data I’ve seen makes a strong case that social isolation is increased by factors like suburbanization, long-commutes, long work hours, decline of community and civic institutions, etc—not online sociality.

A reader quotes Marche:

[C]ustomers stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors. Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships.

Faulty premises lead to faulty results. To the contrary, A&P led to more customers visiting their stores in person instead of having the store do their shopping for them and delivering the goods. Phones led to people making appointments to see each other rather than trudge across town hoping they were home. We know a lot more people than we did back when we walked or rode horses.

Sure, idiots who think they have 3,208 friends are deluded. But since I recently joined Facebook, I stay in touch with my family much, much more than I ever did before, since we live thousands of miles apart. I have a handful of new friends I have never met, but they are people I know through others and we share interests and now plan to meet in person at the first opportunity.

Robert Lane Greene takes his own long look at the social networking mega-site: