PEW: Internet Strengthening Social Nets

A new report from the good folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that the Internet (and e-mail) are increasingly relied up to manage "offlline" social relations/networks and that, in addition, more and more people are relying on the Internet to help them in making major life (cycle) decisions:

45% of internet users about 60 million Americans say the internet has played an important or crucial role in helping them deal with at least one major life decision in the previous two years.

This sounds a lot like Yellow Pages historical behavior and confirms earlier findings by comScore about the connection between "life events" and online consumer patterns. Here's an earlier post about the same phenomenon. And here's a MediaPost article (reg. req'd) specifically about the now year-old comScore findings.

There's probably lots of juicy stuff in the Pew report that I haven't yet had time to digest. But the full report is available for download here.