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 _____________________________________________________________________
At 12:20 Uhr -0500 24.1.2004, Barry Wellman wrote:
I am not taking sides on qual-quant debate (which, being bi-, I find tiresome)
Hi Barry, all, I completely agree. We surf on a continuum of observations that is less or more quant. Best wishes from Zurich, --u
I just thought I would throw some stats into the thread. As while MMORPGs, MUDs, MOOs, _whatever_ are 'popular', the numbers of users do not rank very highly against other popular pastimes. Usage numbers for western MMOs are (very) roughly as follows: EverQuest 500,000 Star Wars Galaxies 300,000+ Ultima Online 300,000 Final Fantasy 300,000 Dark Age of Camelot 250,000 The demographics for these games are fairly well distributed form mid-teens to, well, all ages. So it is not surprising that comparatively few collage age students have not used an MMO. Though it should be noted of course that the number of hours that people tend to spend in this worlds is fairly high, there are some reports at the moment about there being a correlation between the drop in hours males (18-34) spend watching TV and the increase in Virtual World hours, but I'm not sure the numbers stack up. In the East, especially Korea, things are different. There a game such as Linage has 3.5 million subscribers. I don't have the exact stats but the Asian virtual worlds that are said to have over 100,000 members are: Final Fantasy XI Lineage II MU Online Ragnarok Online Lineage Kingdom of the Winds Ren www.renreynolds.com terranova.blogs.com -----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin@aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org] On Behalf Of Barry Wellman Sent: 24 January 2004 17:20 To: aoir list; communication and information technology section asa Subject: [Air-l] qual and quant 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 _____________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
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
participants (4)
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Barry Wellman -
Charles Tilly -
Ren Reynolds -
Ulf-Dietrich Reips