Week 3

QUESTIONS THAT ROSE FROM MONDAY'S LECTURE

The idea of “giving something for nothing”.⇒ we use hotmail, google, MySpace for free for ex. What do they get in return?

Is a virtual meeting less dangerous then a real/face to face meeting?
What do virtual communities bring to users? (Make friends? Create yourself an entire new personality? Business opportunities?…)
Second Life: what does it bring to people? Commercial tool? Does being/spending time on Second Life cuts you out of the reality? After spending so much time online/chatting “virtually”, can you still interact with people in person, or is it too intimidating?

Second Life could be something we could explore in more detail in our group project.

REFLECTIONS

I realised this week that I was getting more secure with the idea of reflecting on this blog. It gives me the opportunity to organize myself in term of work/time/research. It allows me to see my progress (but also the group’s progress) throughout the weeks. We went from one idea (focusing on the Fluokids) and ended up with completely different plans.

We realised this week that it would be difficult for us to focus on the “Fluokids”. The main problem with this emerging youth group is that there is not much information online, especially in English. Their main blog is in French and I am the only one speaking French in the group. Also, most of the information provided is about their upcoming parties and not about the history/creation of the group.

We decided to construct our project in the following way:
Have a core structure based on theories (definition of online communities/ idea of nationalism/shared identity within a group; then introduce different examples supporting these various statements.
Should we include a debate maybe?
Are we going to find “black and white” information or is it all going to be biased?
What do online communities involve? Economy/advertising/manipulation of big companies?

Mette is going to make some research in Benedict Anderson’s book; “Imagined Communities” that she already knows.


MY MAIN CONCERNS FOR FUTURE WORK/REASEARCH

Find reliable sources.
Focus our project on the “Online Communities” = not to overlap (too much) with the theme of “Identity”.


RESEARCH FOR THIS WEEK:

We tried to map out an approximate outline of our group project. According to the outline, we divided research among ourselves:
Mette is going to put on our group wiki a first approximative outline of our project.
All members of the group have different areas they have to research on.

I have to:

Look at online journals regarding “online/Virtual communities” through Lexis-Nexis (University’s online database)
Research about:
Second Life – very visual/ “virtual”
MySpace – more creative
Facebook – basic graphics
Moodle
Elgg
Other interesting online communities