You're opening up a question of broad significance, but quantitative vs. qualitative understates the problem. People at the leading edge of a technology and/or at the center of a communications network have different experiences and form different impressions from those located elsewhere. In the study of transnational social movement organizing by such experts as Lance Bennett, for example, new developments in electronic coordination receive great attention. But we have reason to believe that a) unmediated person to person connections still play crucial parts in the bulk of transnational social movement organizing and b) if those connections do shrivel, social movements will lose some of their longer-term impact on local, regional, and national politics in favor of wavelike short-term mobilizations. I have in circulation papers on the two subjects -- quantitative vs. qualitative and 21st century social movements that I'll be glad to send electronically. Chuck Barry Wellman wrote:
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 _____________________________________________________________________
-- Charles Tilly Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University Office 514 Fayerweather Hall, letters and packages 413 Fayerweather Hall, Mail Code 2552, Columbia University, New York 10027-7001, USA telephone 212 854 2345, fax 212 854 2963, electronic ct135@columbia.edu