CMC!

Computer-Mediated Communication - my favorite topic!

To be honest, I had no idea about Second Life - I really had never heard of it until this last semester at TC, and I had no idea that companies were actually coming up with virtual shoes and products to market on Second Life. I still don't exactly understand how it works - so the Linden dollars work in Second Life, but you can convert them to real money also? Does that mean you have to sign up and use your credit card?

I think all of the new legal issues that are arising because of Second Life is also very interesting - the issues involving virtual sexual and verbal harassment and rape. Does this count as a real act of rape, is it punishable and if so, how is it punished and who decides all of this!? I know the Linden company puts the disclaimer on the page before you sign up that they cannot control what goes on during the session, but does that really absolve all issues? Maybe a court system and police force will have to be neccessary in the future, or maybe offenders will lose their privledges within Second Life.

I also thought that Sean, the young man with the cerebal palsy, is a prime example of the potential benefits that CMC can have for people. One of the reasons that people like online chatting and creating online personalities is because they can hide their real life personality behind this "second" one. People who automatically get judged on a daily basis just by appearance can understand what it feels like to not be judged in this virtual world. They can create their own selective self-presenation and display that to others as they see fit. But I think that one of the things that everyone should keep in mind is that this selective self-presentation is possible. So the "person" you are chatting with might not exactly exist in real life. And do you care?

One of the things that I think people are fearful of when they think about online personalities is that some people may convert all of their energies into this virtual world and not venture into the real world to make real life friends. You can essentially live your life through Second Life by going sky-diving, going to clubs, and meeting new people without ever having to leave your house! But how are these experiences different from real life experiences?

I think that this is actually the point - that the experiences, while the act may be similar, will not exhibit the exact same experience and emotions that a real-life action would. But is that necessarily bad? Just because it's not the same experience does not mean that a degree of these emotions exist - when you are verbally abused in real life, you feel hurt, and the same goes for the online community. It's just a different level of hurt - it might not be as intense, but it still exists.

In regards to the Walther article, one of the aspects that I found interesting was the cues-filtered-out theory in CMC. One of the questions that I posed in my first blog entry was "how is technology changing the way we define things, such as friends.?" While I understand that online chats do lose some of the physical cues, such as smiling, nodding, and hand gestures, that do take away a portion of the communication indicators that exist in real life, the techology has found new ways to include these type of gestures to indicate emotion. Just like I said in the previous paragraph, it may not be the same level of the experience or emotion, but it still exists in its own way. New ways of communicating feelings, such as with the emoticons and abbreviations like lol and ttyl are ways of giving off cues without actually having to give them physically.

PS I also did not know that the smiley icon has been around for 25 years!

Most Intriguing

The concept that intrigued me most from our readings this week was Norman Nie's quote about how "The internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than television did before it." I agree with Amitai Etzioni's argument that claims that "the internet increases our social isolation are wholly unsupported."

Based on our conversations from last year and the first week of class, I would have to say that the internet actually increases participation in communities. Perhaps Nie thinks that the isolation stems from staying indoors and working on a computer in an individual aspect. Technically, the physical activitiy of using a computer is an individual activity - logging on, typing, clicking the mouse - is all individual activities. However, the opportunity to interact with people through the internet is infinite. Perhaps a person who is a loner and has a hard time interacting with people in real life can find a chat room that features only people who consider themselves loners as well. This would give them the chance to participate in community-based activities that they would otherwise not have in real life.

This concept contributes to our discussions from last week because it shows that people are responsible for the user potential of the internet. The websites exist, the chat rooms exist, and its up to the users to determine if they want to use them, how they want to use them, and how often they want to use them. If the users only want to play individual computer games on the internet, against the computer, they could be contributing to this isolation that Nie speaks of. But many websites promote interactions with other people - even ordering from places like Amazon.com allows users to provide feedback profiles of other users that are viewable by everyone. And its up to the user to either read or ignore these profiles. Nevertheless, these possibilities are infinite. Even if the user decides not to use the profiles or interactions, others around them do, which still affects the user in some way - maybe they see the profile and ignore it, but they still acknowledge that it exists and that the potential is there.

3 Questions...

I cannot believe that I actually have a blog. For years I have resisted many popular technological mainstreams, such as Facebook and MySpace, only to finally succumb to my first online identity for this class. And so far, I have to say, it's not half bad :)

1. I am very interested in the concept of the online identity and how it can be different from one's identity in real life. For example, one of my friends who is painfully shy loves being online - she had hundreds of friends on Facebook and spends a lot of her time on Instant Messenger, but refuses to talk to any of her peers in her classes! I have another friend who started an online relationship through Match.com and felt the relationship was going well through emails, but once she met the person, she said they didn't get along at all. I'm sure that many things can contribute to someone's online personality, such as time to think of a carefully-planned response and have the ability to actually behave the way he or she really wants to come across to someone. Which brings me to my next topic...

2. Online dating is such a big phenomenon these days. Suddenly the idea of "finding your soulmate" became potentially a lot easier - people can just create profiles and you can find your "match" (on paper) in half an hour! I wonder how this concept will change the criteria that people find to be important in a mate. If you met someone in real life who was fun and nice, but maybe lives far away from you, you might still date them. But online, you don't even have to talk to anyone who lives too far away from you - here you can decide to disregard all of these potentially nice people because they do not match up to your online criteria.

3. How does technology redefine certain words? For example, a friend is "a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard." However, a Facebook "friend" for some people may be only close friends, but a "friend" for someone else may be just a person who they met in a class or who they thought was interestingl, but have never actually met or spoken to. Thus, how do we define the concept of friendship within this technology era?