Relief

Are you tired of the dry 'assigned' readings? Is Rheingold getting you down? Does your case study need that spark of inspired insight?

Try here for 77 pages of fully-searchable up-to-date community focused articles, from blogs to well, a lot of other cool stuff.

Have fun,

Stew

(Yes, we are now officially overdue!)

Virtual community online: Why people hang out online

This a very mind opening article on why people hang out online, but what I found most interesting about this article was that after I read this article, my confusions about VC and Real communities are becoming more clear. In the literature review the authors explored the definitions of a virtual community. The term "community" reflects the geographic area and "virtual" indicates the absence of physicality and also the electronic interaction via technology. So the computer mediated communications allows people to come online and communicate their similar interests with each other, with a human touch forming "webs of personal relationships in cyberspace (Rheingold, 1993b, p. 5)" (as cited in Ridings & Gefen, 2004).

However, according to Q. Jones (as cited in Ridings & Gefen, 2004), the virtual gatherings (such as chat rooms)which lack regularity is not considered as a virtual community. From this I gathered that a "virtual community" is where CMC occurs with a regularity in its population (members) whereas the chatrooms are to be equated to maybe parks or the beach in RL, where there is a different set of crowd everyday.

It is starting to make sense to me now :).......thats good news right?

cheers
shaba

discussion on possessing barbie

I totally agree with you, Charles and I understand that there are other online/virtual communities other than yahoo and msn messenger :) just haven't been a part of any other than the ones i mentioned (yet).

And yes, as for being aware of being cheated and having bad experiences, as well as good ones ;) yep, we have to be aware of the whole game of being online eh? Kind of like the "Enter at your own risk places" whereby you are expected to abide by the unspoken rules right? Pretty risky I would say.

Want to share your bad experience? hehehe...ofcourse only if you want to ;)

cheers
shaba

More to read and think about...

Hi folks,

I mentioned this week in the lecture a very important piece of early writing on 'virtual identities'. The piece, by Sandy Stone is entitled Will the Real Body please Stand Up?

Meanwhile, lecture notes for this week are online with these questions to consider:

What stories do you tell yourself about virtual communities?
How have you come to form this narrative?
How do we judge whether interactions are ‘authentic’?
Where is the line between communication and community?
Does communication necessarily mean ‘community’?
What ideas about technology does the notion of virtual community serve?

Meanwhile, next week we will be having a guest lecturer, Peter van Schie of Cloud Media, who will be discussing the role of Virtual teams in ebusiness. As the lecture will not cover the e-learning side of this topic I would suggest that you listen to the iLecture on the course site which discusses this side of things. The lecture may also be very helpful when it comes around to the self-reflection at the end of the course.

Thoughts on Mod. 1.2

The readings of Rheingold and Dibell were more of a narrative concept. At first when I was reading the "Daily life in Cyberspace" I really thought Rheingold was talking about real life events and interactions, but after a while he started talking about identities and meeting those virtual characters face to face, then I realised that Rheingold was talking about a mixture of online and offline interactions. For me that was very interesting because earlier I used to think that being cyber was just being online and be online selves, nothing to do with being physically there. However, after reading this chapter, I am beginning to realise that being a part of online community is based on a certain level of trust and understanding between people as well as occationally meeting them offline in the real world as well.

And then I went back to the debate styled discussion in class yesterday (Monday 14th Mar), had to re-think some of my ideas about what a community is. I totally agree with Charles idea of what constitutes a community. However, here are some of my very messed up and confused thoughts :)

Could the community be a pack of people living in the same physical or virtual space, weather they know or interact with each other or not? Could you be part of a community even if you don't share a single interest with the rest of the crowd, but you just happen to live in the neighbourhood?

Sure, a physical boundary was setup, and people started to live in the area and it was given a name....now is that area a community? yep, even if there are some socio misfits, a couple of fake psychiatrists ;) around and you won't keep your door unlocked during night or day the neighbourhood will still be a "traditionally setup" community.

BUT is it the same in VR?All the above mentioned characters apply to VR communities as well. People of a same interest group come online and live there, there'll be the odd one out posting comments that are not relevant and the members will need user names and passwords. Fair enough, it is a community.

At this point I refer to the Dibbell reading "a rape in cyberspace". people go online, form their IDs and personalities (doesn't have to reflect who they are in real life), have supernatural or wizardry powers, have their fantasy related vocabulary such as "teleporting" and stuff. All that doesn't sound real to me. Sure, there are real people with fake identities and powers sitting behind computers, but I just can't shake this feeling of unreality. When the rape happened virtually some of the players in the living room had real feelings and wanted real action taken against the character who committed the crime(which didn't really happen), and finally they managed to kill(virtually) him. However, the next day he was back under a different name. Reincarnation? hehehe. sounds a bit unreal to me.

So as you can see i am a bit confused and not yet convinced on the authenticity of VR communities. I hope I manage to clear these doubts in my mind as we progress throught this semester. :)

cheers
shaba

thoughts on possessing barbie

I've managed to read several of the readings over the weekend, and here is my thoughts on the "possessing barbie" article. Although I manage to read them during the weekend, I had to come over to Uni and spend time using the computers in the labs since I don't have internet connection at home yet.

Anyways, this article mirrors my thoughts and confusions alot. Is it real or is it just a game? I have actually never been a part of any virtual community other than the my conducts on msn messenger. However, using something as simple as msn messenger, makes me wonder what is real and what is not anymore. The fact that I am dealing with real people on the other end is comforting, and yet i find that I am always on my guard if i am talking to people whom I dont know in person. In my msn private conversation box, there's always more than 6 of us around online chatting in the same window. Sometimes, friends are allowed to invite their friends over for a chat, but not knowing who they are in person makes me nervous sometimes.

However, I sometimes log in to yahoo messenger online chat rooms and hang around annonymous and pretend to be a virtual being. The stuff that goes on in a chat room is amazing and more than once, i have to remind myself that this is not real life, and people don't mean what they are saying to each other most of the time. However, hours after i log out, my thought would drift over to the conversations and events that happened in the chatroom, and would think to myself "I can't believe it?"

Possessing barbie is all about being virtual and selfless while being connected mentally and with words. The conversations become real after a while. People get to know each other, after a while, virtual becomes real in a more imaginative way and sometimes we get real reactions. I find this amazing. I guess what counts here is the level of involvement , how serious a person is and how much trust there is between people to accept them as their virtual selves.

Anyways, will post more on the other readings later.
cheers

Virtual Community Humor!

Hi folks...a little humourous reading which actually sheds a fair bit of light on the difficulties of mailing lists and usenet communities:

How many list subscribers does it take to change a light bulb

Enjoy
Stew

great.

Hey, scarlets

Thanks for the invitation.

I just received the invitation so I am just posting a first post. I still have some catching up to do on the readings (this week's as well as last week's). The link Stew has posted about the possessing barbie looks interesting, have to read first ;) So happy blogging after that.

cheers
shaba

Possessing Barbie...

Hey folks,

Good to see the blogs coming along. Just found this interesting piece which was listed in the Guardians top 10 pieces of 'new' game journalism here

The piece is about identity in games but I think it might make for a provocative read for all - examining identity and where 'play' and 'reality' merge. It's called 'Possessing Barbie'

Thoughts?

Meanwhile, a reminder of the questions that appear at the end of this weeks lecture notes:

What constitutes a community: can it be a society, group, association, nation, club, global?
Is it the types of relations between members that defines/identifies a community?
Is community linked to place or religion, common interests or shared practices, or other commonalities?
Can it be experienced and understood entirely through communication or do there also need to be concrete practices that take place – reciprocity, shared processes etc.?
Does a community need continuity/history or is it simply momentary?