Is this getting too real?
I’ve been looking at a lot of research this week, and this has been one of the questions that is much discussed: the degree to which people care about the online communities with which they are engaged.
There’s some excellent insights in a report by the Center for the Digital Future‘s Jeffrey Cole.
One of the questions asked is “How often do you take action offline … related to your online community?”. Turns out 14% of people surveyed do at least once a week.
Then all this began to fall into place when I read this story about a woman in Japan who faces a possible jail term for the virtual murder of her virtual husband in Second Life style game called Maple Story.
I’m not sure which is the scarier idea: that this woman logged on and killed off her ‘husband’ or that the man turned around and filed charges against her for doing so.
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Online communities can, of course, be defined in a number of different ways – Second Life isn’t the only one. Many shopping sites (Ciao.co.uk, dooyoo.co.uk) and networking sites (Facebook, Myspace) could also fall under that umbrella.
There was a study published in the Metro yesterday that women with addictive personalities may turn to places like Facebook and become ‘addicted’ to the making friends aspect – and base their self esteem on how many virtual friends they accumulate. This of course isn’t limited to women, though women are more likely (apparently) to form an index of their self worth on such things. Indeed, there was an article last week on the bbc news site about a chap who murdered his soon to be ex-wife, because she changed her status on FB from married to single (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7676285.stm). That certainly falls into the taking action offline for something that occurs online!
Actually, I’m surprised the figure is as low as 14%, but then, I wonder who they interviewed – it would be interesting to interview ONLY people who are regularly active on online communities.
Here’s a question – could a blog be considered a community? A posting board? Where does the line get drawn?
Great response, Kate… in answer to your final question, I guess the more commentary like this a blog elicits, the more it becomes a community. But I’m thinking more about the obvious social networking subjects and their denizens.
One slight redirection: the 14% referred not to people interacting with their social network/community site, but rather taking that interaction outside the network itself. The figures for logging in to the social network show, unsurprisingly, much higher frequency:
29% several times a day
25% once a day
22% several times a week
9% once a week.
Curiously, versus twelve months ago, all these frequencies show a lower percentage than the prevous survey, prompting some suggestion of waning interest… personally I take that with a pinch of salt.