Robert Bloomfield from Metanomics reported recently in a post on Terra Nova about a panel discussion held in Second Life on the roles and merits of qualitative and quantitative methods in cultural anthropology (yeah, yeah, it's philosophy. Useless, you'd say? ). Here is a prediction they made :

Enterprising young scholars who are interested in cultural anthropology and are also trained in statistical methods are going to draw out testable predictions from the body of existing qualitative work, and test those predictions by applying experimental or econometric methods to data extracted from virtual worlds and social media. They will garner funding and publicity in the areas where they compete head to head with qualitative researchers, and the latter will be forced to defend their methods and conclusions. Some schools will conclude that they can make a bigger impact in the field by hiring faculty trained in these methods. Several decades later, the top departments and journals studying the ideas of cultural anthropology will be dominated by quantitative methods. Qualitative methods will either be relegated to less-prestigious schools and special-interest journals in cultural anthropology, or else cultural anthropology will decline in influence relative to other departments (like psychology) that embrace quantitative methods to study similar questions.

To try to put it in simple words : Bloomfield and his colleagues argue that the long-time effect virtual worlds and social media are going to have on anthropology will be that of forced withdrawal of qualitative against quantitative research. If (roughly speaking) qualitative means developing a theory, and quantitative (even rougher) testing and proving it by gathering data, you get a picture of where it might be going.

Quite profound… Just hope they underestimated the evolution of scientific thought.