WATERMARK

The Internet fosters social contact

A Pew report issued Wednesday, supports the idea the use of the Internet expands social contact:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds
that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care,
financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people
to which to turn.

Further rebuking early studies suggesting
that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually
helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a
University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew
report. 

The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not
replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most
of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about
25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well.
The increase is even greater for cell phones.

“There’s a
certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,”
said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between
face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”

Meanwhile,
Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant
contacts — a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers — and they are
more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.

It does worry me just a little that even the nonusers network of close and significant
contacts is quite a bit larger than my own. Introversion has its downsides.

Via The Power of Many

We don’t have to remember everything

According to an Editor’s Summary at Nature:

A study of brain activity in subjects performing a task
in which they were asked to ‘hold in mind’ some of the objects and to
ignore other objects has revealed significant variation between
individuals in their ability to keep the irrelevant items out of
awareness. This shows that our awareness is not determined only by what
we can keep ‘in mind’ but also by how good we are at keeping irrelevant
things ‘out of mind’. This also implies that an individual’s effective
memory capacity may not simply reflect storage space, as it does with a
hard disk. It may also reflect how efficiently irrelevant information
is excluded from using up vital storage capacity.

Well, that explains it.

Via wake up!

And most importantly:

Poetry is good for your health

That, at least, is the premise of studies currently under way for the
Arts Council and the Department of Health. One study, published a
couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested
that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A.
Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary,
concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients
to be weaned off their anti-depressants. Poetry, it seems, is not the
new rock’n’roll, but the new Prozac. […]

OK, so the rest of the article isn’t quite so promising. Still, I’m practicing belief in the unlikely, remember?

Via Dumbfoundry