Most of what i'm seeing with younger folks is a tight integration of RL and virtual communication channels. For youth, it's no longer like there is the PHONE and the INTERNET; there are lots of possible ways to communicate with people you know (and at most, their friends) via a variety of different channels. Rather than meeting in chatrooms, groups of people who know Bob comment on Bob's LJ and connections form, just as if Bob through a non-alcoholic cocktail party.
I am wondering if there are any studies confirming this assertion, but there are a few things I have seen in a longitudinal data set we have collected over the last few years. Yes teens use IM a lot. They IM friends about as frequently as see friends face to face. They seem to rate IMing, though, as the least enjoyable of the three modes of communication (IM, phone, face to face). Granted we did not ask about cell phones and cell phone ownership, but it seems that most teens IM and call their friends, people who are in close geographical proximity. For teens there are rarely any "virtual" communication channels. They are all real life channels because they happen with very real people, not disembodied online handles of individuals they've never met before (in interviews many teens said that meeting people online was "weird" and not something they considered doing). What's more, the patterns of IM use and face-to-face interactions seem similar, while phone-use patterns are different. We suspect that teens use phone and IM with friends at school (or church or any social space they where they spend time). Yet these friends make up two groups - the IM group and the phone group (presumably the teens that do not use IM or have a more regimented computer-use schedule and aren't as accessible). so I think for youth there is still the PHONE and the INTERNET out there, but these channels of communication occupy different niches of needs. Teen technology use is fascinating specifically because teens, young kids, have a tendency to grow up and become adults, who bring all the technological habits with them into an adult world. Some of this use will have to readjust as it gets applied to older adults who already occupy the adult world (that's us, folks :). Previous fascination with MUD's and MOO's was understandable as these environments presented amazing research opportunities - a social world in text, where everything can be recorded and tracked - relationship formation on paper - its a researcher dream. I think research into online communities, MUD's, MOO's, chat rooms, and, more recently MMORPG's, blogs, live journal, etc, are very important and really useful. It can make explicit testing of many social behavior theories possible. The trouble begins when researchers start thinking that what they see in an online world applies everywhere and to everyone. Yes maybe meeting people online is a wonderful thing, but only about 10% of survey respondents in at least one national survey reported that they have met someone online and developed a relationship with them. I could get more technical with the numbers but the point is that many people use the Internet and very few use it to meet new people online, at least in the US. Studies of online communities are just that - studies of online communities. Its a very small subset of the population and this behavior can not be generalized outside of the niche. This does not make these studies any less useful or important, but it is not surprising that most people are actually not part of the population that engages in MUDs or MOO's or Chat Rooms. Irina Shklovski Graduate Researcher Human Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie Mellon University ==================================== irinas@cs.cmu.edu http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~irinas http://miswritings.blogspot.com "To create means to live, forever creating newer and newer things." -- Kazimir Malevich, 1915 ====================================