Americans tend to have fewer close confidants today than they did two decades ago -- but that isn't because they're all huddled over their computers playing World of Warcraft or reading the Volokh Conspiracy.

A report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that the Internet and other new communication technologies have, if anything, a modestly positive effect on the size and diversity of people's friendship networks.

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The Pew report is based on a 2008 telephone survey of roughly 2,500 American adults. The survey included the same questions about friendship networks that were asked by the General Social Survey -- a longstanding study based at the University of Chicago -- in 1985 and 2004.

The 2004 round of the General Social Survey appeared to discover Americans' intimate-friendship networks had drastically shrunk since 1985. Among other things, the proportion of Americans reporting that they have zero intimate friends rose from 10 percent to 24.6 percent.

But that finding has been called into dispute. Claude S. Fischer of the University of California at Berkeley believes it is highly implausible that friendship networks have declined so badly, and he has argued that something must have gone wrong in the collection or coding of the 2004 survey.

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