Weeks 1-2

Ok, so my flat finally has broadband up and running and I can sit down and work on this blog!
Firstly I would like to say how impressed and a little intimidated I am with some of your blogs, I can really see how beneficial this little project will be when it comes to revision and exam time. I hope that at some point I will post something beneficial for someone.. anyone ha.

Anyways after that nervous ramble I wil get on to the subject of week two that is Architectures.
Architectures as we learnt in class are made up of three intertwined layers of users,networks and structures, to analyse this I thought it would be good to look at these through the example of our Blogger project.

Firstly lets look at users and identity:
The users in this case are obviously our class of COMS205 students (and of course Erika). The interesting thing will be how we each develop our online (Blogger) identities. A large part of this will come down to what we each chose to disclose: some of us may just disclose details only related to themselves as a COMS205 student and others may become more comfortable and disclose more personal details about their lives offline. I guess this will depend on those who decide to really immerse themselves in the project and those who are just filling it in for that precious 40%. I have a sneaky suspiscion that even the most sceptacle of us will eventually warm up to it and if not .. well unfortunatly as we learnt this week there is no such thing as anonymity online, once you have that blog set up then we can and probably will engage with you forcing you to interact!

I understand that the overall aim of this project is too see how communities are formed and if infact by the end of these 13 weeks we will have our own virtual community defined by Reingold (1996) as:

"social aggregation that emerge from the internet when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough with sufficient human feeling to form webs of personal relationships..."

Will the fact that we are all first and foremost doing this for marks mean that we will be unable to really form a community as subconciously we will not be able to let "human feeling" interfere with the acedemic task at hand?
OR
Will we fall into the trap of Blogger like most of us have with the likes of facebook and bebo, let our walls down and become a true online community of interest (not neccessity)?

Will the fact that we communicate in the real world in class and seminars have an affect?

At the moment I think that we will form a great acedemic network but i find a true online community will be a stretch... who knows i look forward to finding out!!

This is getting huge so i will just touch on the third layer: structures
In our offline world we have a top-down structure where the are rules put in place by our government and punishments enforced by our legal system for breaking those rules.

Our Blogger community on the other hand has a lateral structure meaning that we will adhere to social norms such as not swearing excessivly and refraining from personal abuse. If someone were to deviate from these social rules they would most likely be punished by the other bloggers in a way which we see fit eg. exculsion from blog, cold shoulder in class :P

Surveillance works by shaping and framing that is athough we may feel we have the ability to choose how we navigate the network as we please our choices are restricted by structures as in Erikas aquarium example. In our case although Blogger is a space for personal blogging, in order for us to gain 40% we have to critically discuss lectures and readings on a weekly basis and interact with others in our class. Thus our blogs have already been shapedto some extent before we have even logged on.

well thats all for now, please feel free to add to this or even correct me where you see that i havnt quite got the point haha
:):)


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