If you believe the results of a study by those chaps over at the USC-Annenberg School Centre for the Digital Future, the answer to the question posed in this blog posting title is 43% of Americans. That is the number of people who took part in the survey, were already a member of a virtual community and who said that the virtual world is just as important as the real one.
The fact that the 2007 Digital Future Project reveals that 20.3% of virtual community members take actions offline at least once per year that are related to that online community, and that such online participation leads directly to social activism. Indeed, the survey suggests that 64.9% of those participating in social causes online are involved in causes that were new to them before that online participation started, with 43.7% participating more since they joined an online community. Some of the other statistics are, perhaps, less surprising: 56.6% login every day, 70.4% interact with other members while logged in (would be a pretty dull online community if they didn’t, although the figures also suggest that 29.6% must be confirmed lurkers of course.)