Positive Effects on the Hybridization of Interpersonal Relationships with the Net

The favorite social network of families is WhatsApp, where most of the family connections are present (82%). On Facebook, however, they are just over one half (51.4%). The instant messaging application is also the social network in which the respondents are more present with active profiles. This is one of the many interesting facts that have emerged from the report recently presented in Rome by the International Center for Family Studies (CISF), which has realized more than 3,000 interviews on “Family relationships in the age of the digital networks,” some of whose aspects we have already analyzed.

According to the report, social networks become valid support for cultivating family relationships, but above all when family members’ are far away: circumstances in which digital technologies are used to organize family life on a daily basis are much less frequent. Particular attention is given in the discipline of the use of technological tools by parents with children who are still minors: more than half (54.1%) speak with their children about what they do on the web, 53.2% put rules on the times of use. Older couples with adult children are, conversely, excluded from this type of communication.

The judgment of the CISF “does not necessarily appear to be negative.” “On the contrary, the survey data shows that the hybridization of interpersonal relations with the network seems to have more positive than negative effects on almost all the indicators of family cohesion and, in part, also with regard to civic participation in the public sphere.” The research indicates the presence of four types of families, characterized by different ways of “hybridization of family relationships:” on the one hand, singles or couples of young people (34.2% of the samples), including many unmarried cohabitants, are immersed in the world of digital technologies and, on the other hand, “marginal and / or excluded families” (28.6%), that is, elderly people who are single or elderly couples, use few or no new technologies. In the middle, there are “mature families moderately present online” (13.4%), those composed of adults of mature age, with older children, present on the web with moderation, and the “youngest families decidedly on the networks" (23.8%).