Photo: Andrew Braithwaite

In 2009, the Pew Internet Trust published a survey worth resurfacing for what it says about the significance of Facebook. The study was inspired by earlier research that "argued that since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased."

In particular, the study found that Americans have fewer close ties to those from their neighborhoods and from voluntary associations. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend.

If you read through all the results from Pew's survey, you'll discover two surprising things:

1. "Use of newer information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as the internet and mobile phones, is not the social change responsible for the restructuring of Americans’ core networks. We found that ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities were associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks."

2. However, Americans on the whole are more isolated than they were in 1985. "The average size of Americans’ core discussion networks has declined since 1985; the mean network size has dropped by about one-third or a loss of approximately one confidant." In addition, "The diversity of core discussion networks has markedly declined; discussion networks are less likely to contain non-kin – that is, people who are not relatives by blood or marriage."

In other words, the technologies that have isolated Americans are anything but informational. It's not hard to imagine what they are, as there's been plenty of research on the subject. These technologies are the automobile, sprawl and suburbia. We know that neighborhoods that aren't walkable decrease the number of our social connections and increase obesity. We know that commutes make us miserable, and that time spent in an automobile affects everything from our home life to our level of anxiety and depression.

Indirect evidence for this can be found in the demonstrated preferences of Millenials, who are opting for cell phones over automobiles and who would rather live in the urban cores their parents abandoned, ride mass transit and in all other respects physically re-integrate themselves with the sort of village life that is possible only in the most walkable portions of cities.

Meanwhile, it's worth contemplating one of the primary factors that drove Facebook's adoption by (soon) 1 billion people: Loneliness. Americans have less support than ever -- one in eight in the Pew survey reported having no "discussion confidants."

It's clear that for all our fears about the ability of our mobile devices to isolate us in public, the primary way they're actually used is for connection.

On average, the size of core discussion networks is 12% larger amongst cell phone users, 9% larger for those who share photos online, and 9% bigger for those who use instant messaging.

The Pew study is full of factoids like this one. Bloggers are more likely to have confidants of a different race, people who upload photos online are 61% more likely to have a confidant with different political views, etc.

Humans are a social species, and we will use any outlet we're offered to connect with one another. Cultural shifts, the flight to the suburbs and our short-sighted investments in fossil-fuel based infrastructure put up barriers to social connections that we are only now coming to grips with. For all the hand-wringing over how we connect online, it's clear that the one unalloyed good social networks have accomplished is a net increase in our interdependence.

The question worth asking is: How did it occur to a generation raised in the suburbs that they could have the kind of civic life that can only be achieved in people-centered neighborhoods? Isn't it possible that in the 21st century we expect more of our physical environments because that kind of connectedness is what we've come to expect from our our virtual ones?

The drained expanse of McCarren Park Pool, August 9, 2007. That's the last time I saw Beastie Boy MCA alive. Not like I knew him; not like I wasn't sharing the experience with 5,000 other people.

And yesterday, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Youtube, a whole slice of usually too-preoccupied-with-its-own-mortality-to-participate-in-civil-society Gen X rumbled to life to mourn his passing.

All the best tributes were public and immediate.

(The Times has a bunch more of these.)

Twitter filled up with #RIPMCA, as did the comments on every Beastie Boys video on YouTube. Those of a certain generation couldn't open Facebook without seeing another Adam Yauch meme.

It's moments like these when it feels as if grieving is exactly what social media is for. Like it's better at this than pretty much anything else, including celebration (too remote, and liable to inspire jealousy), the everyday (too trivial) or anger (too much like bitterness or schadenfreude).

Whether or not you care who MCA was, the expressions on social media feel authentic, maybe because they're unadorned, straightforward and nakedly imperfect. Everyone who writes about their grief knows in advance that words fail, so the usual look-at-me temptation to be too clever by half disappears.

Sherry Turkle, professor at M.I.T. and author of "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other," recently described in the Times how we use mobile devices and social media to filter and sanitize our interaction with the real world.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

So do a thousand microblogged tributes to MCA mean anything to all the Gen Xers who thought they would be young forever, but who discover that, to a degree that makes the realization as mundane as dust, they too will die? What conversations aren't happening because we've dispensed with our grief in the "safe" realm of the Internet?

But that, I think, is too cynical a view. Expressions of grief have always been public -- that's the catharsis part of the process. That's what social media is good for.

In the case of grief, at least, Turkle's thesis doesn't quite apply. Because in any age, after all the public mourning is done, the unchangeable core of the human condition is that we are all very much alone, privately meditating on death and its implications for ourselves.

Seen in this light, the title of Turkle's book, "Alone together," becomes the ultimate testament to the therapeutic power of social media. We don't need technology or a dissertation on its impacts to tell us that we are alone. But surely it's all the better to be alone, together.

Update: Or not! According to lots of people, I got this completely wrong, since Google has a Dashboard that contains some of the information this piece asserts that Activity should contain, and I sincerely regret not including it in the original draft of this piece. At the end of this post, please find a full response from Google, or check out the comments to learn just how daft I am. (For yet a third perspective, here's Om Malik agreeing with the original thesis of this piece, even in light of the Dashboard.)

Google Account Activity is Google's fairly transparent attempt to differentiate itself from Facebook by being open about what it knows about you. But in their attempt to not overwhelm you with the truly scary amount of data they have compiled about you, they boiled it all down into a super accessible milquetoast of a dashboard that tells you absolutely nothing.

How do I know that Google Activity is a useless pile of overdone pabulum? Easy. I feel totally comfortable sharing my dashboard with you. Here it is.

This would not be the case if Google were actually telling me what it knows about me.

First off, it's just sad that Google Plus does not even show up on this dashboard. Apparently even Google has given up on it. Moving right along, what profound insights did I gain from this dashboard? That my most e-mailed contacts are my wife, my editor and myself, in that order. Also, my most popular video uploaded to YouTube is the only one I've ever bothered to publicize. (It is about Steve Jobs, and you should watch it immediately.)

That's it. You know what Google isn't telling you?

• Google knows every search query you've ever entered while logged in

• Google has all kinds of demographic information about you

• Google has probably derived, from the above data, everything from your sexual orientation to your hometown, though I can't prove it.

• Google has a rough idea of your social graph, based on your gmail contacts and the frequency with which you email them.

• Thousands and thousands of lines of other information about you.

I'm disappointed. I thought Google Account Activity was going to tell me exactly what Google knows about me. Sort of like that teen who sued Facebook to force the company to send him everything they had on him, and it ended up being more than a hundred megabytes' worth of material.

The truth is that unless you're vaguely creeped out by the results, Google is not telling you all that it knows about you. Google has every email I've ever written, every chat transcript, every search query back to the birth of the site (but anonymized after nine months).

On the one hand, I can understand why Google didn't provide all this information in a single dashboard. If anyone were to log in to my account, it would be a one-stop shop for a level of privacy violation the world has never seen. But on the other hand, isn't that precisely the point? This data exists. Google has it. I want to see it -- and I want the option to delete it.

* * *

Chris Gaither of Google responds

Account Activity is a beta feature. If you sign up, we'll send you a monthly report with some insight into how you're using Google while signed in. We started with some commonly used services like Gmail, Search and YouTube, as well as security settings like application-specific passwords. You can access deeper controls by hovering over each section; for example, clicking on Web History Settings takes you to your signed-in search record where you can view, edit, delete and turn off your Web History if you'd like.  

The Google Dashboard, which we launched in 2009, helps answer the question, "What does Google know about me?" It shows you what information is stored in your Google Account and enables you to change your privacy settings from many products in one central location. Here's more information about it on our Good to Know site, including a video. And you can check it out at google.com/dashboard.