Cummings, Butler and Kraut examine survey data about personal relationships mediated by different media. They conclude that relationship mediated by Internet communication encourage fewer feelings of closeness than non-internet relationships. In addition, they analyzed listervs, and noted the weak social ties between members.

I very much dislike the idea of using listservs as the paradigm for internet-mediated personal relationships. I subscribe to a number of email lists, each is related to a specific job function with which I might need help or be able to help others: CSS-Discuss, Javascript, Microformats, and W3C lists. Each of these lists contains a large amount of members interested in an exchange: a solution to a problem, a patch of code, etc. Comparing these types of listservs with a social group is laughable—it's more like comparing my relationship with the members to the staff at Trader Joes: I go there when I need to, make the desired exchange, and then leave. In this case, the lists do inspire better relationships, because of the reputation systems that develop within them.

A better subject for Cummings et al's study would be a blogging community. There are countless web developers whose blogs I read, many of whom cross-read each other, and yet never (or very rarely at least) meet in person. Yet these bloggers link to each other in praise and criticism, and even pass musical batons. WIthin this type of community, I bet Cummings would find a very different answer to has question.

This article follows Kraut's 1998 study in claiming that time spent online diminishes social involvement and psychological well being. The authors break down the effect of the net on (1) the quality of particular social interactions and (2) the mix of of social interactions afforded. They examine previous studies of net communication to find that quality(psychological closeness) is lower in online relationships.

In most of the studies they point to, the main electronic medium under study was email. These studies found that email was less valuable for building close social relationships than f2f or phone conversations. I thought it was quaint that the bank employees in their 1991 sent an average of 15 email a week.

They found that frequency of communication was a main predictor of psychological closeness, *but not on the internet*. This may mean that internet relationships hit a "wall" at some lower threshold than off line relationships.

Finally, to mirror Ryan's points, i think their studies were well done, but i dont think they generalize well to other areas of the internet, like instant messenger, IRC, etc. Additionally, the idea of analyzing online v. offline communication seems myopic: i have very few close relationships that are entirely one or the other, and my choice of communication is entirely situated in the context of my relationship with the person im talking to.

Connections and Critique 

It seems Cummings et al.’s study gave an opposite conclusion to the McKenna’s study in that Cummings et al.’s study showed that relationships built online were not as stable and not as valuable as those offline. However, there is almost exactly same finding from both studies: if two persons meet in person then that couple is likely to have closer relationships than two persons who communicate only via emails (Cummings et al. p 104 Figure 2; McKenna et al. p19).  I think it is obvious, but it is nice to see two studies actually supported the intuition.
 
I found one of Cummings et al. study results particularly interesting: Frequency of communication is a positive predictor of close relationships offline, but it is not the case for the relationships online. They are mildly negatively correlated (-0.08).  Why is that?  My intuition tells me that you communicate more with someone you feel close and you like than someone you don’t even they are cyber-space friends...

Summary

Cummings et al. begin by observing that understanding the impact of the Internet on social relationships requires us to ask two types of questions:

1. How does CMC affect the quality of social interactions and relationships?
2. Does CMC supplement communication with existing friends and family, or does it substitute for "more traditional communication and social ties"?

 In the rest of the article, they go on to address the first question and conclude that CMC, particularly email, is less valuable for building and sustaining close relationships.

Critique

As others have mentioned, I found these two questions to be strange premises. With the first question, for example, Cummings et al. are asking if online interactions and relationships are "better, the same, or worse than those sustained by other means". The question seems to beg a straw man argument. Depending on what criteria you (or your subjects) have for making such qualitative judgements, it would be easy for the affordances of one mode of communication to triumph over another.

Furthermore, they claim that "in one-to-one comparisons, an email message is not as useful as a phone call or face-to-face meeting for developing and sustaining social relationships" (108). But is a 'one-to-one' comparison a fair one to make? One of the benefits of email is that its such a cheap and easy method of  high-volume communication. One can interact with dozens of different people each day or one person a dozen times a day, which is something much harder to accomplish with non-Internet communication.  

Directing these questions to the BaWers

Cummings et al. would definitely fit my report of the BaWer community as one of the 'non-representative studies'. Here is a group in which the majority of members meet one another for the first time online. In the short six weeks of the workshop, the develop intense friendships and loyalties toward the group, and the majority of these sustaining interactions are through the community message board (a Yahoo!Groups listserv).

It is a moot question to ask if the interactions are better or worse than they would be offline--this community wouldn't, indeed couldn't, exist without the use of CMCs. The cost of 254 language instructors (whose occupation isn't the most lucrative in the first place) from five different continents interacting daily and meeting several times a week would be prohibitive.

To be fair, I would have to say that CMC in the BaWer community does occasionally "substitute" for offline interaction time with friends and family members. Active BaWers are always joking about having to "kiss their spouses and kids goodbye" for the intensive six weeks. At the BaWer graduation ceremony, in addition of downloadable "Webhead diplomaas", there are also certificates of appreciation for "orphaned children" and "abandoned spouses".

I had previously heard skeptical reactions to this paper from researchers, and was not surprised by the skeptical reactions here.

I tried to find out if there had been a more recent study with a different methodology and found the following Pew Internet Report:

The Strength of Internet Ties
The internet and email aid users in maintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions
Jeffrey Boase, John B. Horrigan, Barry Wellman, Lee Rainie
January 25, 2006

They surveyed 2,200 adults age 18 and older, from February 17, 2004, through March 17, 2004.

One of the things they examined was the replacement hypothesis, whether email replaces other means of social contact. The result they found was that email is adding on to other communication media, and not replacing it. It should be noted the study focused on the effect on two types of ties, core ties (very close relationships) and significant ties (outside the ring of core ties but more than acquaintances).

I also agree that it is kind of silly to compare Usenet to people's best real life friends. I am not clear how he argues that the net benefit of online relationships depends on whether they supplement or substitute offline relationships. Does he have data for this that I missed?  

Cummings indirectly makes an interesting point that matters more than he thinks it does. Any time spent on the Internet is time not spent doing something else. This means that whenever differences are observed between heavy net users and light net users it is important to ask whether the observed changes are because the heavy net users are using the internet or because they are failing to do something else. Perhaps it is important to consider which control groups are appropriate when looking at heavy Internet use. For example, when talking about "what heavy Internet use does" perhaps heavy TV use is a better comparison than light Internet use. 

Summary
The authors assert that the relationships formed online are "less valuable" than relationships formed offline. They arrive at this conclusion by examining two things: 1) how the quality of social interactions are affected when they are created over a digital medium and 2) whether online relationships supplant or suplement offline relationships.

The authors replicated a comparative study of communication media and found that email was less preferred by participants who wished to sustain personal relationships. Communication in person and over the phone were much better predictors of relationship strength. They examined listserv interactions to try and determine relationship strength in non-dyadic environments. Here, too, they found the quality of conversation low compared to face-to-face mediums.

Critique
I would have appreciated a more detailed examination of the listservs broken down by both activity level and list purpose. 33% of the listservs they examined had no activity during the observation period--I'm unclear as to why dead lists are allowed to weigh down the numbers they've come up with here. What's the point? At any rate, I'd be more interested in an examination of active listservs: are there similarities in joint enterprise? Are online relationships uniformly less valuable than offline relationships or are there situations in which online relationships are more valuable? All these questions are outside the scope of this article.

Connection to Cool Running
It's no listserv, but I see Cool Running as a place where people try to approximate the kinds of offline relationships they have--or would like to have--with other runners. Offline relationships between runners are likely about (in no order) creating accountability, staying motivated, enjoying the company of others, and feeling a part of a running community. I see elements of all these in the interactions that occur in Cool Runnings: people post reports, they engage in "off topic" talk, they get and give advice, etc.

Notes 

In the article, Cummings et al. argue that the Internet is less effective than other means of forming and sustaining strong social relationships. The study is based on listservs and one of the conclusions they reach is that listservs are not as valuable as small (social) groups for establishing a sense of identity and belonging and for gaining social support.  

Critique

I agree with the authors in that electronic communications, particularly email, is really good for information exchange and from time to time we all complain about how it is different from f2f communication since we cannot see or hear the person(s) we are interacting with. That said, I had difficulties in interpreting the results of this study.

The authors claim “Internet listservs do not appear to be intimate social groups” (p. 107). But I cannot see how exactly they reach to that conclusion. What properties should a social group have to be considered as intimate? I also didn’t understand why it is an exception when interactivity occurs in these contexts (I am assuming in the context of listservs). Cummings et al. compare the listservs they studied to typical ones but they don’t tell us what typically happens. Maybe we are expected to read the paper they referred to in order to understand this.  

Moreover, the authors seem to put emphasis on “social activity” and measure it in terms of volume and interactivity. Interactivity is measured as average discussion thread length. So, if there is only one thread consisting of lots of posts, then that group is supposed to be very social. Similarly, the group can be considered very social in the case of having lots of lots of threads with only one post. I remember we discussed this in class when we had Butler reading two weeks ago. He used similar measures in that study too.

It was interesting to read this article from Cummings et al after reading McKenna's article on how online communication can improve social involvement and psychological well being. I agree with others on here-- Cummings' use of listservs as a comparison point is poorly executed, as listservs embody a very one-way interaction with people and information. As I was reading this article, I started thinking about the discussion forums I'm involved in where there's a high level of back-and-forth conversation with a high degree of closeness obvious between members. Such communities are much more like the membership size and change, communication volume and structure, and participation levels of traditional small groups that Cummings contrasts with listservs (107)-- a core membership base that does not fluctuate, frequent communication, messages almost always receiving at least one response, and more than just a few core active participants. Large discussion forums even have their own cliques much like large social circles in face-to-face interaction. 

 To an extent, I agree with the authors' point that email messages may not be as useful as phone calls or face-to-face meetings in certain cases; however, I also think that email communication has its advantages for people who feel shy when talking in person or for certain topics that may be better explained in written words. I also feel that email communication is highly useful as a complementary communication tool to face-to-face or phone conversations.

Comparison to Geo Aware Communities
Despite my disagreement with the authors' broad-sweeping points here, I do have to admit that the communication level seems rather low on some of the geo aware communities I am studying. I think the low socialization rates can quite possibly be explained by what Cummings et al are saying here, as some of the conversation-sharing aspects of these communities (Yellow Arrow especially) focus more on one-way interaction than two-way conversation. For instance, I can leave a TXT (basically a comment) on someone else's profile; they could respond by leaving a TXT on their own profile as well, or by leaving one on mine, but in neither case would this appear to be a coherent conversation. The idea behind leaving a TXT, further, is more based along the vision that one can leave feedback about a location or cache or arrow found.

On the Geocaching site there is a separate discussion forum area in addition to the cache database where members can have threaded discussions with one another. I suspect that this helps to improve on Yellow Arrow's situation by encouraging the formation of relationships among like-minded cachers. However, these relationships are not visible from the user profiles or from the cache pages, necessarily.

These communities, as a whole, serve as a good example of how the Internet helps bring people with similar interests together who may otherwise have never found each other. I understand Cummings et al point that people often rate offline relationships as stronger than online relationships, but if anything, this just gives us something to strive for in developing the next generation of communities. How can we help members of niche communities develop relationships online that are as strong as their relationships offline?

Cummings et al. have already received a well-deserved skewering by my classmates, and I agree with the comments above that the problem lies with how they framed their study. If anything, their reliance on listservs, their focus on media and frequency of communication rather than the content and quality of those communications, and their ham-handed distinction between 'online' and 'offline' relationships suggests this study was out-of-date before it was conducted (as late as 2002, no less). 

I don't really see much use for this study in regard to Milliways. Yes, many members of the Milliways community make efforts to meet in real life ('Milli-cons'), which may suggest they place greater value on friendships that persist across modes of communication. However, any study that takes a similar approach to Milliways must account for the fact that, 1) it is the strength of online communication that inspires the desire  to meet face-to-face, and 2) most players in Milliways joined the community at the recommendation of someone they already knew, either online or in real-life. The categories used in the Cummings study are simply not nuanced enough to offer a useful model of the Milliways community or the kinds of communication its members exchange.