Technology experts embrace the use of networked communications technologies and are naturally inclined to find them to be useful in social relations, so it is no surprise to see the high level of agreement that the Internet is a tool that gets positive results. Still, quite a few people took advantage of the opportunity to provide written elaborations in which they pointed out many negatives, and they shared other incisive observations.

Survey participants were asked to reflect on their personal experiences. Most participants’ enthusiasm for the type of connectedness they feel online is evident, and many told their own specific and very personal stories in the written elaborations.

In all of the tension pairs offered in the 2010 survey, people’s answers were dependent upon how they defined the key terms in the question set – in this instance, the respondents’ individual definition of the word “social” was primary and it varied, as expected.

The growing popularity of social networks over the past five years has had a significant impact on personal and professional relationships and many survey participants referred to Facebook and social networks in general in their answers. The other most-often-mentioned digital networked communications methods included in the survey-takers answers were email, voice over IP (Skype is one example that was used), and text-messaging.