The National Geographic Society, long known for vivid photos of animals, people, and their habitats, wants to compose a "global snapshot," using the Internet. The society is conducting Survey 2000 to chart human migration and determine how much our moving about the globe has formed who we are and how we live our lives.
"Technology is often seen as a co-conspirator in the breakdown of community, since technology not only facilitates mobility but it also has tended to expand the size and scope of our social world," said Jim Witte, assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University and academic head of Survey 2000.
"The goal of Survey 2000 is to provide the data necessary to begin to fill this gap in our understanding and to encourage others to re-evaluate the link between mobility and community in today's world," he said.
Valerie May, the project's director, says despite the fact that the survey is exclusively online, the offline community will be invited to participate through friends with Net connections.
The Net-connected are encouraged to host Map the Global Village events to help people without Internet access to complete the survey.
It took National Geographic two years to prepare the online survey with the help of 14 academic and professional advisers and researchers. The five-part questionnaire consists of standard census-type questions relating to household and family size and cultrual background, plus queries concerning a visitor's mobility and Internet usage patterns.
A dynamic database poses the questions, so if you answer that you've only been online twice and that you live in North America, your next set of questions will vary from those received by someone who lives in Brazil and has been a netizen for the past two years.
National Geographic's surveyors need 18,000 completed forms to have a valid statistical base that signifies a trend, and two weeks into the project they're more than half way there. About 10,000 users have submitted surveys, which take about 20 minutes to complete.
The aggregate results will be posted in November 1999, and an interactive database will allow visitors to do their own investigating to learn, for example, where country music is most popular.
