Contact: Bonnie Nardi

A good deal of communication is intended to create feelings of connection between people rather than to convey specific messages. While face to face interaction is especially rich in ways to establish connection (touching, eating together, making eye contact, sharing common space, informal chitchat), people also establish connection through mediated communication. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, email, chat, newsgroups, listservs, websites, and games are especially interesting forms of human communication that establish and maintain fields of connection as well as allow for the exchange of substantive information. My most recent research concerns massively multiplayer online games. I am conducting participant-observation fieldwork in World of Warcraft, the most popular MMOG, studying how players collaborate as well as the relationship of offline, online, and in-game activity.