A combined study by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University has revealed that in the coming decade, Internet will benefit users socially more than it will harm.

In this study, about 85% of the 895 Internet experts and users admitted that by 2020, when a bigger picture is taken into account in the terms of personal friendships, marriage, and other relationships, the Internet will prove a positive and constructing force in the social world. Also, the surveyed people found it to be growing with years.

According to a participant of the study, Craig Newmark, also a founder of Craigslist, net provides people platform for linking people online for commerce, politics, and personal life and it improves the real-life relationships with location-based social networking taking sharing an important part in it.

The participants explained that they felt more connected to their family, and they also reconnected to their old friends and that this would not have been possible without Internet.

Amy Gahran, Senior Editor at Oakland Local, and Co-creator and Community Manager at Reynolds Journalism Institute also shared his view about net use. Amy said that with Internet, it has become easier to find out people having same characteristics or interests and that in “pre-Internet” times all this was missing.

Surprisingly it was found in the study that only 14% did not support the use of internet and promoted its harms more than the benefits.