[Air-l] The Internet Is Changing The Way Canadians Socialize

[Irina Shklovski]

>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

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irinas at 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
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