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Where is the Community?
The concept of a community in cyberspace is going to be an ongoing discussion for years to come as was evident in our class discussion. No one can really tell someone else that it is or it is not possible to have a community in cyberspace. The experience is all based on the individual and that persons idea of what an actually community consists of. A community is a place were people meet that have similar interest or share like ideas. However; it is also a place were people meet and have the opportunity to see each other face to face and exhibit non-verbal communication.
I’m not sure were I stand on this issue, because I just created a discussion board for my “community” on my web page. Although I know it is not a real community, somehow when I log on to it I feel really connected.
In the article “Virtuality and its discontents” Sherry Turkle talks about comparing a trip down the Colorado River to an adolescent girl’s use of an interactive CD-ROM to explore the same theory. Although she could use the touch-sensitive screen to explore the virtual Colorado, she still would lack the risk that comes along with actually being there.
You tell me
The article “Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web” by Daniel chandler says that “Personal homepages are online multi-media texts which address the question, Who AM I? This is a questioned that I began asking myself when I started building my web site. I thought it would be all about me, and then I started to realize that other people were going to be reading this. I had to ask myself. How much of me do I want strangers to know about me? I slowly began to see that regardless of what I put on my homepage, it still was going to be a reflection of myself. Which is what was quoted in this article “Show me what your links are, and I’ll tell you what kind of person you are.” This quote is so true, because once I finished I looked back at my site links, and sure enough there I was.
(I M) me
In the article “Communities in Cyberspace” by author’s Peter Kollock and Marc Smith they talk about text chat and how it differs from e-mails and BBS’s .The way that it differs is that it allows a number of people to chat simultaneously. One of the first things that I wanted when I thought about building my web site was to have an ability to have online discussion in some form. That is why I chose to do a discussion board as opposed to the other options. The authors talk about how most chat systems support a great number of “channels” dedicated to a vast array of subjects and interest. This is an idea that I am very fond of, because I often go to different chat rooms and try to discuss whatever the topic is supposed to be about. However; that is not always the case, sometimes I will visit a chat room that is supposed to be about sports, but the conversations ranges from everything from sex to religion. The article talks about how commercial chat services usually are policed by the provider’s staff; unfortunately I’ve never experienced that policing.