Meeting and Connecting in the Age of the Interweb

Here's a graph to look over and think about for a while:


It comes from a paper by sociology researchers at Stanford and the University of New Mexico, based on a 2017 survey of heterosexual American adults (and earlier surveys).

It's important to note that this data is based on open-ended questions that were coded to these categories, so any respondent's answer could be coded to more than one category: if someone originally connected online but then met in person for the first time at a restaurant, both types of meeting would be shown here. So according to the authors, that accounts for the big increase in first meetings in bars and restaurant: they are the second step of meeting online.

The big straight-line drops in "met in primary or secondary school" and "family" are not as surprising to me as the plateau and then dip in "met through or as coworkers" and "met through friends." As the researchers point out in the text of the paper, there are two points where the "met online" trend rocketed up: with the advent of the web browser after 1995 and the smart phone after 2007.