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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ ***** I'm glad to see that Social Network Analysts have finally realized that a computer network is a social network -- as a lonely few of us have been saying for at least a decade. I couldn't read much of the last two days' exchange, as the HTML garbage almost totally overwhelmed my ASCII reader. (I thought this was an ASCII-only list, btw). However, what I did make out was mostly assertion. There is data on this folks. Lots of it are contained in Wellman & Haythornthwaite, eds., _The Internet in Everyday Life_ (Blackwell 2002). The book, btw, contains a revised version of the American Behavioral Scientist paper someone was kind enough to mention. As far as we know now, using the Internet does NOT decrease f2f and phone interaction. So the overall volume of contact is going up, as is the amount of written communication (reversing the trend to orality), and probably the diversity of ties. More research needs to be done, and NetLab just got a nice grant to do it -- going beyond the quant. numbers to see what people are actually doing. In East York, of course. Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director [log in to unmask] 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 ___________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.