The beggining of the Blog...

Hey guys, My names Lauren.

I come from Hamilton and am in my second year in Dunedin studying communications and marketing.

I am somewhat a bit nervous about this whole blog thing, doesn't really seem 'me' sitting here talking to a computer. This whole paper actually freaked me out abit at the start as i am really the most un-tech savvy person one could come across. I was always the kid that when EVERYBODY else got a cell phone and i was feeling highly left out of the loop i got a cellphone and when EVERYBODY else was sporting the ipod mini i got the ipod mini just because it was the 'thing to do'. I was never the one to grab on to technology and pray that Santa would treat me with the latest advances. Technology as a whole has never really phased me and has just always sort of been there doing its thing not holding my interest for particularly long. To me the internet has also always been just that, the internet. I have actually never put any thought into where it comes from, how it has evolved and how it actually works. So far this paper has actually really opened my mind as to how vast and extreme the net is. The thing that has really interested me so far is the topic focused on in our 3rd lec, Users, networks and Structures and the topic of community vs network.

I never considered myself to be labeled a 'virtual community member' but by being signed up to and having profiles with bebo, Facebook and Myspace i am exactly that. These community's let me talk and keep in contact with the goings on of friends that are back home or overseas. On these profiles i have never let on the details of my daily life but still have a few pictures up just to show what i am up to. Never once have i considered that some strange person that i don't know could be going through my details and pictures but whats stopping them from doing so? David Berry looks at the conception of "public" and "private" and discusses how everything on the internet is assumed to be public and there is actually a line between the two that often gets confused. Berry looks at the way the internet allows users to "post and read texts without restrictions, which lends itself to being conceptualized as a vast public sphere"

This leads onto the topic of communities vs networks that we had in groups in class. I think Communities should be viewed as "private" and networks as "public". I view communities online as your friends list that you have on bebo and facebook. These are the people that you generally personally know and have to actually go through the process of accepting them as your friends whereas networks is the larger group that you and your friends belong to where there is generally a larger number of members and you are not actually connected to everyone personally but more just by one thing such as where you live or what sport you play for example the Otago network on Facebook. It would be near impossible to know everybody that is a member of such a large network.

When using these virtual communities i have never been one to get hooked on them and spend hours at a time searching through peoples pages but there most definetly must be those kind of people out there spending there days on them flexing their true identity to suit the person they most want to be. As Kollock and Smith said " Online interaction makes certain kinds of interaction more difficult, but also provides room to play with one's identity". It is this idea of anonymity and that anybody can be anyone.


Anyway i think i have rambled on for long enough now! catch yall later :)