Emma (and others), Though I think the Wired article focused more on college age students, I'll throw out this information from a study of secondary-school students to add to the discussion. Earlier this summer in a workshop at C&T, I gave some preliminary results from a survey of teenagers enrolled in a new media-based online community funded by the NICHD (n: 71, avg. age: 16 yrs., avg. grade 10th). In one section of the survey the teens were asked to report the number of online communities where they currently maintain a profile (with maintain meaning visit or update on a weekly basis). We found that the average number of online community profile profiles per teen was 2.6 (std dev 1.5), with 46% saying that they maintain more than two online community profiles and 18% reporting having profiles in four or more online communities. I would suspect that this number is on the low side, as the teens self-reported this number and I would also hazard that the number they reported was also influenced by their perception of whether we would share this information with their parents (though it was clearly specified that we would not, the teens had to provide their parent/guardian information so that we could approve their participation in our online community), and also based on their perception of what an online community/profile is. Another confounding factor came from looking at the communities the teens actually reported. We found that several of the teenagers reported having several profiles in the same online community (such as having three MySpace pages). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- David Gurzick E-Mail: gurzick1@umbc.edu Ph.D. Student AIM: dgurzick Information Systems Department Tel: 301.514.5156 University of Maryland, Baltimore County userpages.umbc.edu/~gurzick1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- On 8/24/07 10:51 AM, "Emma Duke-Williams" <emma.dukewilliams@gmail.com> wrote:
I've just been reading Wired's article about SNS for Students and Marc Canter was quoted as saying that the average user was active in 5 Social Networks. I wasn't entired sure if they meant "5 communities" or "5 websites", but, given that they then went on to list 5 sites, I guess it was the latter. (http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/student_networks )
I've found (I think!) Canter's blog ( http://marc.blogs.it/) but can't seem to find anything about the numbers of active networks.
I was rather surprised to read the 5, clearly the definition of "active" could vary, I'm sure my MySpace account that I signed up for ages ago doesn't count, but I wouldn't call myself active on Facebook either (login perhaps once a fortnight, don't actively add friends, delete requests from those I don't recognise etc).
I'm also assuming that he's not counting things like forums, which are, in effect, a community, but again, I could be wrong.
Does anyone else have any evidence (published or anecdotal) to support or otherwise Canter's claim?
Emma