On Sun, 6 Aug 1995 "Donovan White"  quoted me:
>Vin Crosbie   wrote: 
>> You won't find hard research data backing this up in any Times Mirror
>>Survey, pages of Interactive Age or Interactive Week, or even the
>>Vanderbilt Univ. Internet Marketing Research site. You'll find it
>>visiting Icon Bar in S.F., Cybersmith in Cambridge, @Cafe or Icon Bar
>>in NYC, etc., where you can look over the shoulders of 21-39 yr.-old
>>patrons to see what, individually and in groups, they are doing online.

To which he retorted:
>Sorry, the trends of the avant-garde do not reliably presage the
>future development of the volk.
>
>Cambridge, San Francisco, and New York City are not indicative of 
>anything in the rest of the world. For which we all are extremely 
>grateful.

And the next day, "S. Finer"  chimed:
>The data I am familiar with (not anecdotal gathered at trendy bars)...

I'm glad to hear we shouldn't worry about the sources of trends in the United 
States. Generation-X certainly hasn't been influenced by the trends occuring 
in San Francisco, New York City, and Cambridge. Trends in those cities 
certainly didn't have influence on my generation during the 1960s. It's not 
like we're at a loss to think of any decade in which those cities' trends 
didn't effect American history. And it's not like we have to worry that 
Generation-Xer's don't read newspapers.

I thank RASCHKE who replied to Donovan on Mon., 7 Aug 95:
>I would invite Mr. White to see what is happening in Taos, New Mexico
>or Grayson County, Texas, or Oklahoma for that matter. He might be in for
>some revisioning of his perspective...

And Ray Niemeir, who on the same day, gave concrete examples (which will 
probably be disparged as "anecdotal") from Waco, Texas, and Cassville, 
Missouri.

And in what he described as a "rambling note" on Sat, 5 Aug 95 19:31, "Curt 
A. Monash" <0006058685@mcimail.com> characterized the import of my cyberbar 
anecdote as:

>Vin Crosbie argues that people on the Internet are looking for a sense
>of community.  He uses as an example people who go to cyber-
>coffeehouses. That, of course, is hardly a random sample, and so has
>little bearing on his point.

I never used people *going* to cyberbars as an example of community. 
Cyberbars in themselves have the worst sense of community I've ever seen 
outside of the Nuremburg War Trials. No one speaks to anyone else or even 
acknowledges others' presence; everyone is oblivious to all but whatever is 
on their terminals. (Some of the food tastes 1946-issue, too).

However, cyberbars are marvelous places for finding out what Generation-Xers 
care to look at online; for gathering raw and objective data, cyberbars 
and places such as college library computer terminal rooms are far more 
convenient, and lot more legal, than peeping into apartment windows. You 
'surf' over patrons shoulders to see what they're doing online. What 
individuals are doing online; couples are doing over a shared terminal; 
groups of friends are doing around a common terminal. Patrons of cyberbars 
are there voluntarily and free to choose what they want online. There are no 
focus group observers or one-way mirrors to make them feel that they must 
look at your online product; no researchers to induce them with designed 
questions to anticipated answers.

So when Curt says that this "is hardly a random sample, and has little 
bearing", well, I'd be hard pressed to say what could be a better random 
sample and have more bearing.

(Lost among the beer taps and T-1 circuits of cyberbars is the irony that 
these are places where patrons gather not to communicate among themselves, 
but with people up to a world away.)

- --------------------------------------------------------
Vin Crosbie                          voice: 212-207-9290
FreeMark Communications, Inc.          fax: 212-207-9295
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza        work: vin@freemark.com
New York, NY 10017 USA           http://www.freemark.com
                        personal email: crosbie@well.com
- --------------------------------------------------------



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End of online-news-digest V1 #281
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