As the Internet grows and networking seeps into all its darkest corners, social scientists, engineers and physical scientists are recognizing that the Web is becoming a “tool” for research rather than a “subject” and that virtual worlds have shifted from being, well, recursive and internally focused, to being valid platforms from which the real world can be studied.
Findings from the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago that happened this month found this to be conclusive. Mark Fellows of Michigan State University wrote,
Increasingly, the Web is moving beyond its use as an electronic “Yellow Pages” and online messaging platform to a virtual world where social interaction and communities can inform social science and its applications in the real world.
The group of researchers presented their findings in a meeting organized by Thomas Dietz, Michigan State University researcher and director of the university’s Environmental Science and Policy Program.
Poly sci professor Arthur Lupia found that virtual communities are “improving surveys and transforming social science.” Adam Henry, a doctoral fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University’s Center for International Development, measures social networks and “us(es) the virtual world to identify things that are going on in the real world rather than using the virtual world simply to look at the virtual world.”
Rounding out the discussions, William Bainbridge, program director for the National Science Foundation’s Human-Centered Computing Cluster, “contends that virtual worlds are excellent laboratories for observing and prototyping new social forms that can later be applied to the outside world.”
On which point I have some issues, but we’ll leave that to the accountants and anthropologists to sort out.
Read the abstract here.
The shift you speak of in your first paragraph reflect that people operating in the virtual world do so much the same way they operate in the physical world. As for the quote from Mark Fellows, my personal reaction is “Duh!”. Sherry Turkle’s work starting with “The Second Self” in 1984 and “Life on the Screen” in 1995 show that even text-based worlds could “inform social science and and its applications in the real world”
No doubt you will “pardon my French”, inasmuch as, being French, you will no doubt pardon my English.
Here’s what I “jump” (?) at:
“us(es) the virtual world to identify things that are going on in the real world rather than using the virtual world simply to look at the virtual world.”
Indeed. I have met people in Second Life telling me they had foreseen a slump in the financial system because of a similar earlier slump in their virtual activities. For all I know, a wide range of economics researchers have recently said that as well, that is true.
So why do I get this strange feeling as I’m thinking of Claude Lévi-Strauss?
I do believe there are set patterns you can recognize in both virtual and real worlds. Therefore, no doubt, you might analyze the real world as things happen in the virtual one.
Nonetheless, it seems to me this is missing the point. That is why I shall use the word “candid” to describe the findings of such eminent people, notwithstanding the respect I might bear to such people.
There are links, indeed, between the two worlds. How could it not be so? Yet, as far as I know, I see the virtual platforms as an “extension” from real life. Not a danger per se, but a new stage in society’s evolution, such as, let’s say … impressionistic painting for the 20th century.
Must we analyze the beginnings of 20th century real life through the vision of impressionist painters?
We shall.
Must we also analyze the events leading to “impressionisme”.
Of course.
The real question, I think, is thus not to watch the virtual world as a tool to analyze “things that are going on” in the real world, but as a “real” phenomenon, which may show things that will possibly happen, or even how society, culture and so on will develop.