Dear Friends and Colleagues, I've been meditating on the buzz on the AoIR list about 2 weeks ago that very few people use MUDs, chat rooms etc. (This from the Cdn Ipsos-Reid survey, but we all assumed that US was similar.) Most list members who commented reported that their undergrads had never really heard of such stuff. In fact, many of their students didn't even think they were on the Internet. They were "just IM'ing," etc. This low immersion in virtual community culture is not a new phenomenon, because our National Geographic 2000 survey data (collected in 1998) showed the same thing. So, I suspect have (and will) other studies. I think the reason that immersive virtual communities have been so prominent in the media and in analysts' eyes is that they are so imageable and so amenable to study by qualitative means. I am thinking here of really fine stuff such as Nancy Baym's soap opera study and Lori Kendall's Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub. OTOH, quant. survey stuff is better at placing prevalence in perspective, even though it is much harder to tell a good story about it. I am not taking sides on qual-quant debate (which, being bi-, I find tiresome), but on the different outcomes in public and scholarly discourse of the different forms of research. Obviously, we need both. Barry PS: At the risk of going even further out on a limb, I think that's what happened re Howard Dean in Iowa. The 20-something Meetup/Moveon campaign was so bloody imageable, from the NY Times Sunday mag. to Wired. Meanwhile, Kerry just kept organizing in traditional ways, but nobody wrote stories about that. (Of course, Dean was ahead in the polls till the last week, but why spoil a good story?) _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________