Demographics and Sociographics of the Digital City

During the last decade, various systems have been created to support local communities and shared interest groups. Knowledge about the use, users, and effects of these new systems is needed to inform design and implementation. In this paper we present the results of a survey among inhabitants of the Digital City, a large infrastructure for ‘virtual communities’. The number of users, the range of facilities offered in the Digital City, and mutual interaction between the users does increase. At the same time, the original local (Amsterdam) base of the system has disappeared, and today’s users are living all over the Netherlands. The population of the Digital City is fairly homogeneous, and therefore does not reflect the heterogeneous nature of a ‘real’ city. Use of the Digital City is mainly recreational, and not yet integrated with other aspects of daily life.