05/02/05

This page is dedicated to my Cyberculture class concepts.

Community

Steve Rubio discusses home pages, how they are interlinked to other home pages and how they create a “neighborhood”.  I agree with Steve Rubio in that online communities are happening all over the Internet, but the relationship is uncertain to home pages.  Just because internet users are participating in some type of online community (message boards, emailing, surveys, etc.), doesn’t mean their home page or “online identity” is necessarily connect and portrayed in these communities.  One identity can belong to many communities. I think Rubio is correct when he says that the “selfish” nature of home pages can be problematic.  First of all, just because we view someone’s home pages doesn’t mean that we know them or understand what they were trying to portray to the public.  The internet is open to everyone world wide and people of different cultures can easily misinterpret what a certain user is saying about himself.  Most home pages are built to the “self”.  If you are participating in an online community of some sort, then you have moved from self to other, neglecting the original thought of yourself and now shifting to interaction of some kind with others.

Identity

If someone is creating a personal web page, then yes, they are creating their vision of themselves and putting it out on the internet for others to view and hopefully gather the same conclusions from viewing the web page.  But these pages can be fictional or real or a mix of the two.  There are no internet police making sure that everything on the web is 100% correct.  As humans, we are complex people so when creating my web page for this class I chose to use very basic colors because I was trying to stay away from cheesy colors.  If I would have taken this class as a freshman, then I think my web page would have been very “pop” compared to what it is now.  Over the years my “self” has changed and if I would have had a website all these years, I would have made it a point to change the site as I have changed.  Constructing our selves on the web is one part, but the other part is to keep up with the ever changing self.

Relationship of Community and Identity

Identity is how an individual is recognized whereas a community is a group of people or group of “identities” that have the share the same interests or location.  I think that a community is made up of different identities.  Someone may be interested in basketball, so they join a basketball team which is one community.  But that same person might be interested in novels and can join a local book club which is also considered a type of community.  People have different interests that make up their overall identity and they are able to connect with others who have similar interests in communities.  I don’t think the internet changes the nature of the relationship between identity and community.  Communities are still made up of many identities but the ones in the community have a shared identity that they can express with others just like them.