[Air-l] qual and quant

[Barry Wellman]

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
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