Editor’s note: Maren Elwood is president of On-Site Research, Carmel, Calif.

Each year since 2004, to produce our Cyber Census - a syndicated cross-country ethnographic research study - members of our firm have boarded an RV and driven from coast to coast, covering 15 to 20 states each trip, to track a core group of 150 Americans and their use of and interaction with Web-based and other technology.

The interviews are designed to allow the researchers to embed themselves in the consumer’s real life, from a few hours to days spent living with the study participants. We also conduct a full exploration of the consumer’s online life via a surf-along, which lets us experience their cyber lives.

Our research shows that people are increasingly looking for a space in the home, most often the kitchen or family room, where they can interact with people and media in both physical and cyberspace. They want a highly interactive room that lets them socialize in physical space while using their handheld devices and computers to access their virtual environments.

This trend has manifested itself in number of ways: in some homes, dining rooms are rarely used for dining; computers are migrating out of the home office; and technology of all types has moved to the family kitchen.

Our observations led us to the acronym HIVE (highly interactive + virtual environment) and the associated term hiving, which is our way of characterizing this trend.

Our choice of HIVE to describe this consumer behavior was bolstered when we started researching beehives and found that bees behave in a similar fashion. Bees have various ways of communicating but they ultimately return to their hive to work together to produce honey - a task they could not do alone. Like bees, people come back to their HIVEs and want to share the efforts of their day with others both physically and virtually. This desire has prompted many consum...