Awhile back we all had a discussion trying to answer this question, and we realized that web sociology was at once active, reflective, and interactive. You can discuss topics like gender, religion, sex, politics, personal growth, etc., online, with people from all over the world, all ages, male and female, parents and non-parents etc., and actively work to achieve synthesis by listening to different perspectives, disagreeing perhaps, and then learning from them. Active web sociology occurs when people from Australia, Israel, Sweden, Japan, India, Canada, and the United States meet in an online community and find a synthesis in the way they view issues personally important to them. We do that here a lot, too. Among the topics we have discussed in this vein are Prisoners on the Web and Drug Culture on the Web.
Members are free to wonder about things, whether they be issue-oriented or personal in nature.
You can talk about what is on your mind and discover new ways of looking at things. That process of discovery is more important to me than the topic of conversation. I am fascinated by the thoughtful interaction that takes place between people who meet by chance in an online environment. A valued list member observed that many lists he joined started out talking about the topic they were created to discuss and ended up talking about something entirely different. And I thought, yup, list discussions seem to do this.