WEEK THREE LECTURE NOTES

This week were taking a closer look at the relationships that are formed by online communication platforms!! Specially about how people interact and how they use the provided facilities to express personal opinion and their identity.

Identity experimentation - people can present and portray themselves how they want! Perhaps in experimenting in areas of their life that are more socially controlled offline, such as their sexuality. However the dangers of this seem to be ever present!! The fact that people can pretend to be someone their not, I find quite daunting. It has led to many criticisms of the internet and wide availability it provides.
It draws on opinions of Shawn P. Wilbur as he refers to ‘ the emancipatory discourse of cyberspace’. The sense that being online can be a liberation from the offline world and the roles and identities it requires of us. Wilbur often refers the 'virtual community' that the internet has created and how it has allowed us to create our own 'virtual identity.'


Nicholas Negroponte pronounces digital technology as 'True personalization is upon us’ - this means how as time goes and as the further advances of digital age opens up more and more ways and choices will open up for us to express ourselves in the way would normally but in digital.

Postmodernism Vs new media. In slight contrast to Negroponte who thinks that simply the advancements of this online technology is simply providing us with more ways to express ourselves as we are, writers such as Mark Poster and Sherry Turkle have argued that electronic media can radically change our sense of self.

Three eras
1)Era of Oralism
2)Era of Written exchange
3)Era of Electronic
LOOK HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED!

Therefore the ability of personal expression and identity must have adapted to fit these different forms.

How virtual reality , evokes play and discovery, instituting a new level of imagination

Howard Rheingold asks

"are relationships and commitments as we know them even possible in a place where identities are fluid? We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and unpack the identities of others."

I think this is an excellent quote!! It questions how possible it is for people to get across their true identity via online communication???? there are no facial expressions or tone of voice and sometimes no visual aids (some people use webcam) .
Surely without all these very personal attributes that help to make up a persons identity then a true representation of their identity cant be show on online.
However there is the argument that perhaps people are adapted and learning new ways to express themselves. It just whether the new generations new learning is good enough?

Ideas about identity-as-play camp. How the internet can be away for people to communicate free of the social baggage such as class, race, gender, nationality that alienates and divides people.

I think that this is one of the most highly questionable attributes of online communicate. In relation to blogs, forums, and chat rooms unless you truly know the person in the real world, face to face, I think it's highly unlikely that someone can present their true self, to like, via the use of words on an online discussion. However with the advancement of technology and the growing use of webcams, and programs such as skype (a phone call over the internet)it will possible to give others a close match of your identity, presuming your honest of course!!

Reading- online seminar