Addictions

I got the new issue of Yahoo! Internet Life in the mail the other day. It contains an article about a recent study released by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society. The study claims that almost 15% of online users are in danger of losing contact with "real human beings." "The more people use the Internet," the article says, "the more anemic their offline social life becomes." 1

The article goes on to debunk this theory, offering reasons why this study (and others like it that have been done in recent years) shouldn't be taken too seriously. It points out the people taking part in this study weren't really an accurate representation of Internet denizens.

I didn't really need the article to tell me this, of course, because I've seen for myself that the Internet doesn't necessarily turn people into a group of social misfits. My lab? The online Xenite community.

Now granted, we are all well aware that fans of Xena: Warrior Princess who inhabit the digital realm aren't a very good sample of the show's fans overall (however vocal they may be). But, I do think that it provides a fairly respectable sampling of the general online population. After all, Xena has clearly demonstrated an ability to cross demographic lines -- remarkable for what is basically a campy genre show.

So, I don't think it is too much of a stretch to use the online Xenite community as a representative sample of the Internet as a whole. Xena Online Resources lists over 1,500 different websites in their directory. Whoosh! has had 45 issues, with hundreds of contributors. There are dozens of mailing lists out there, some of them with thousands of members (Chakram for instance, has over 2,000 registered members). Needless to say, the online community is huge.

My experiences with this group over the past couple of years have shown me that these fans aren't a bunch of acne-faced nerds with coke-bottle glasses downloading pictures of Renee O'Connor to drool over (though admittedly, that is going on). To the contrary, a perusal of any random issue of Whoosh! will show that while they may have time on their hands, Xena fans are, for the most part, an intelligent group of folks.

But, they're a social group too. Sure, there are the well-known cliques out there -- the subtexters, the GJRS, and the MacConnors, just to name a few -- but when events roll around, most of the differences are put aside to celebrate the shared love of the series. A fan is likely to find a group that gets together to watch the show on a regular basis in any major city in the United States, and only need make a couple of inquiries online to find them (and secure an invitation to the next gathering).

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic