Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name

An academic collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign titled Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name:
Online Games as "Third Places" looks ta two different studies to examine the impact of replacing traditional media with online games:

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).

Source: Blue's