blog 4

Part 1: Using the virtual and RL communities you are a part of for evidence, describe how you agree and/or disagree with Bell and Bauman's notions of virtual communities as peg communities.


As a user of many forms of online communities I feel I adopt a slightly different persona for which ever social site I may be apart of. Bell refers to this occurrence as "peg communities". This term is a reference to online communities being compared to pegs on a coat hanger, infering that a person wears a different coat for different occasions. This is the comparison for the notion of one adopting different (appropriate) identities for online communities.

This occurrence of my split personas across the internet is for two main reasons. One being that the particular online community might be very topic oriented , for example, an online photography community based on sharing a critiquing photos will mainly only portray me as a photographer with an artistic eye and opinion. The subjects of my photos may create subtle aspects of my life and identities, but most all of my personal life will be kept untold in this space merely because most of the happenings in my day are irrelevant for my audience. The second reason for creating a sort of façade of an identity is to hide characteristic about myself from certain public eye. On websites like Facebook and twitter I am watched by a diverse array of acquaintances, ranging form family members, business associates, teachers, and close friends. To ensure I don’t embarrass myself or offend any of these diverse categories of acquaintances in any way that could result in unwanted actions RL and RL aspects of the VR world I must filter myself to this audience. I choose what to say in order to portray myself in my best interests. This leads to another topic brought up in the reading. The points about "bonds without consequence"(258) as stated by Bauman in the year 2001 I find to be an outdated statement. Much has changed about the online world since then. Society has gone from a world where full names would ensure identity-theft to a world of searchable home addresses/phone numbers via Google, high school reunion communities, and full name screen names of Facebook and Myspace. So the idea of “bonds without consequences” is easily untrue due to the ability of all VR communities being intertwined with RL interactions.

Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy. eds. The Cybercultures Reader. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge. 254-264. Print.

Part 2

http://www.deviantart.com
http://www.Flickr.com
http://www.photobucket.com

I chose these three websites because they are based around the same idea of uploading images to a users personal account but are vastly different in aspects of photo sharing, community interactions, and image content. When viewing other user profiles on these sites a person can take an interesting look into the daily life of that profile users image store and could create assumptions about that user and their life, hobbies, interests, or agenda.