Well, I could have told them that

I was a loner when I was a kid. Even when I was six, I always preferred to sit in my room by myself making doll house furniture out of construction paper and Elmer's glue than going out to play with other kids. Most of it was that I was both clumsy AND fearful, which meant that I was afraid to climb trees, afraid to get dirty, afraid of a ball coming at my head. I was always the last one to be picked for the team, the one who was teased about my height or my weight or for Just Plain Being Weird. So it became easy to just hang out by myself. It's not that I didn't have friends, but while I know people who have friends they've known since childhood, my own usually cast of characters has always rotated depending on what I was doing at the time.

I often wonder how my life, my worldview, and indeed my own self-esteem might have been different had there been such a thing as "online" when I was growing up. Because for someone like me, online life has opened the kind of doors to social contact that I never could have imagined when I was a child. The friends that I've made online have been more lasting and closer than almost any I ever had that started in real life. The massive amount of online writing I've done, both through this blog and elsewhere, has allowed me to meet so many wonderful and interesting people -- people like Beth, who was my first online friend; Shelly, whose life during the time I've known her is worthy of a full-length book that I've been betgging her to write for the last five years; Shirley, whom I've met in meat world exactly twice and each time it's as if we meet for coffee all the time; and Barbara, who's from Slovenia and is ironically the first online friend who crossed over into meat world during a visit she and her husband made to New York. Then there are the movie review folks, like my honorary brother ModFab and Mary Ann and Betty Jo, just to name a few. And of course since I started this blog in 2004, there are even more, like Tata and Tami and Melina and the Morning Seditionists crew and so many others. I may not be the greatest correspondent in the world, but I value the presence of all these people in my life.

The teenager who sat by herself in a far corner of the schoolyard writing broody poetry about being alone never could have imagined this world ever opening up to her.

So I didn't need a study to tell me that "bloggers are better adjusted and live healthier, happier social lives":

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology found that “people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog” after a two month blogging period when compared to people who do not blog.

The good news also extends to users of social networking sites, with the study finding than any online interaction makes users “feel less anxious, depressed and stressed.”

It’s not all good news however, as the study found that some “potential bloggers” start from a less socially integrated position. Professor Susan Moore told the ABC:

“We found potential bloggers were less satisfied with their friendships and they felt less socially integrated, they didn’t feel as much part of a community as the people who weren’t interested in blogging,” Ms Moore said.

“They were also more likely to use venting or expressing your emotions as a way of coping.”

“It was as if they were saying ‘I’m going to do this blogging and it’s going to help me.”

And the point is?

Of COURSE bloggers are people who use ranting as a coping mechanism. Why on earth else would someone get up at 5:30 in the morning and write almost every day without getting paid? As for those who blog starting from a "less socially-integrated position", that isn't Breaking News either. For social misfits like me, writing was ALWAYS a way of coping. I still have the diaries I kept from when I was in junior high and high school, and if they weren't so painful to read, they would seem as if part of someone else's life. In my generation, we wrote in blank cloth-bound books with little locks on them so we could pretend no one else could read them. Later on there were 'zines and amateur press associations. Now there's LiveJournal and blogs. I suspect that if you polled most bloggers who do this in their leisure time (as opposed to the Big Boiz (and Grrlz) who make a living out of this, you'll see a similar history of diary writing in some form or another.

So I wonder how much of a grant the Swinburne University of Technology got to do this study.