Pew study finds social media fanbois like social media a lot

Pew study of social media users' views on social media (full report here):

....a significant majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey say it improves social relations and will continue to do so through 2020.

Some 85% agreed with the statement:

"In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future."

Some 14% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

"In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a negative force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future."

Most of people who participated in the survey were effusive in their praise of the social connectivity already being leveraged globally online. They said humans' use of the internet's capabilities for communication -- for creating, cultivating, and continuing social relationships -- is undeniable. Many enthusiastically cited their personal experiences as examples, and several noted that they had met their spouse through internet-born interaction.

The underlying drivers are seen to be the lowering of the "friction" of communicating - cost, geographical barriers and time required to keep in contact with people.

The drawbacks perceived were....

Among the negatives noted by both groups of respondents: time spent online robs time from important face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters mostly shallow relationships; the act of leveraging the internet to engage in social connection exposes private information; the internet allows people to silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; and the internet is being used to engender intolerance.

So what's not to like?

One of the issues with all this is that the survey was done of "experts" and "stakeholders". Pew says that:

The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged Internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes

And if you read that detailed survey methodology (I do this sort of stuff for a living, these things interest me) and the list of famous Soc Med fans questioned, the worry is that the recipients are not neutrals. "By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample" says Pew. I'll say - read the respondents opinions over here.

Which begs the question of the whole point - never mind the veracity of - the study. It is clearly not useful as research, so what is the aim here? I have no objections to a "Delphi" technique (questioning experts to get their views), but ths isn't one, as the questions are pre-structured to derive a result, and the approach is not made very clear in the press release.

The worry I have with this sort of "research" is that tech journalists and bloggers will pick up on the press release without looking at how it was done, and if enough of them do that you get a distorted view of the market. Perish the thought that this may, in fact, be the aim (I see that GigaOm wasn't taken in....)