Mark Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, suggests so:
The circumstances that once compelled Americans to develop familiar but less intimate relationships have faded. The time and attention we now spend online and with our closest friends is time not spent outside talking with neighbors, shooting the breeze at a bar, or grabbing a burger with a colleague from work. And while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, we ought not to be so naïve as to think that that those new relationships don’t come at a cost.
There are elements of the new social architecture to celebrate. A 2009 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that those who use sites like Facebook are generally in touch with a broader – and more diverse – set of acquaintances. But Stanford sociologist Norman Nie designed studies to explore how investments in certain types of relationships affected others. He concluded that every minute an individual spends on the Internet reduces the time he or she spends with friends by seven seconds, and with colleagues by eleven. In the absence of the sorts of relationships we once had with people who were familiar, but not intimate, we’ve become walled off from people who hold different points of view.
The Dish 