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Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places"

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Media scholars have become increasingly concerned with the possible negative social and civic impacts brought on by the diffusion of both traditional media like television and cable and new media such as videogames and the... See more » Media scholars have become increasingly concerned with the possible negative social and civic impacts brought on by the diffusion of both traditional media like television and cable and new media such as videogames and the Internet. This concern is perhaps best known as the "bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions. According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities. While few dispute Putnam's richly detailed evidence of the general decline of civic and social life in America during the rise of television, some scholars have argued that online, Internet-based media are exceptions. The evidence to date is mixed (Smith & Kollock, 1999), with some scholars arguing that the Internet's capacity for connecting people across time and space fosters the formation of social networks and personal communities (Wellman & Gullia, 1999) and bridges class and racial gaps (Mehra, Merkel, & Bishop, 2004), and other scholars arguing that the Internet functions as a displacer (Nie & Erbring, 2002; Nie & Hillygus, 2002) enabling little more than "pseudo communities" (Beniger, 1987; Postman, 1992). A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent (Bakardjieva, 2005). Online technologies enable a broad range of activities: searching information, visiting chat rooms, downloading music files, corresponding with friends and family by email, browsing political blogs, playing in 3-D virtual worlds, and others. It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures (Lessig, 1999)—their designed-in, code-based structures that afford some forms of social interaction and constrain others. In this way, we might determine what underlying variables are involved in each activity (Evelund, 2003) before drawing conclusions about the effects of online media as a whole. In this article, we examine the effects on social engagement of one particular increasingly popular online activity: large, collaborative online videogames called "massively multiplayer online games" (MMOs). Our collaboration on this project is somewhat novel, combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning. Our joint product represents the culmination of these two lines of inquiry in terms of (a) the extent to which such spaces are structurally similar to "third places" (Oldenburg, 1999) for informal sociability (Bruckman & Resnick, 1995), and (b) their potential function in terms of social capital (Coleman, 1988). Despite differing theoretical and methodological vantage points, our conclusions are remarkably similar: By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old. Moreover, participation in such virtual "third places" appears particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital (Putnam, 2000), social relationships that, while not providing deep emotional support per se, typically function to expose the individual to a diversity of worldviews. In this article, we present our shared theoretical framework of third places and social capital, highlighting the consistent trends observed across two distinct sets of data gathered through two separate lines of inquiry. See less »

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videogames steinkuehler williams thirdplaces screenname

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From the list : CMS 998 by alist

Steinkuehler & Williams' recent piece on MMOs as social spaces.

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Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places"

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