This week we looked at online communities and I have chosen to talk about three of personal interest to myself.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/
Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are all social networking services. Facebook and MySpace allow individuals to create pages containing information about them. From these pages they can become friends with other users, post whatever they want on their profile, add photos and videos, and join and create groups or pages. I think the intention of these two is to create a fun and fresh way of communication and with the growing rate of the use of the internet these sites are extremely popular. Twitter is also a social networking service but is more like a blog where one individual will post either a comment, picture or video of whatever they like. The purpose of the site was to utilise texting to communicate with a small group. Twitter is used by a lot of celebrities to update fans on what they are doing, which isn’t necessarily important, in fact apparently around 40% of the points are “pointless babble”. However despite this Twitter remains a very popular service.
All three of these sites are very interactive, they all work on the basis of communicating your own ideas with groups of others, they all have a sense of community to them and I feel people whom are consumers would feel a part of a community. Although these sites seem a bit egotistical there are a number of good causes which are represented. Groups for a large number of really worthy causes are made. These raise awareness of certain things people can do to help people and bring out human compassion where a group of complete strangers can come together and support something they have a common desire to fight for. These sites allow people to maintain contact with people whom may be live ten minutes away, in another city or even in another country at the click of a button. This is a strong movement which encourages, supports and offers communities to be built and maintained.
I feel people join these services to keep in the loop of what is happening in their social circles and keep in contact with friends and family they may not have as easy access to contact if these sites did not exist. I know I personally joined Facebook as all of my friends had it and as we were all going our separate ways after secondary school I wanted to easily keep in contact with them as a group. All three of the cites allow group interactions and I believe people enjoy the opportunity to monitor what is going on in the lives of others and also be recognised as a member through their input to the networks.
One problem which often arises in these types of communities is to do with ethical issues. It is so easy to create a profile and take on a completely different identity, age or gender. Unfortunately because of this these types of communities are often subject to fraud and hacking of profiles and innocent people are taken advantage of. The people running these sights are trying to minimise the chances of this happening as much as possible but unfortunately due to the nature of these sights it is really easy for people to provide false information as no real identification in required to join.
This type of community unfortunately doesn’t promote traditional forms of communication such as writing letters, talking on the phone or even meeting up face to face. When I look at it this way it saddens me as it leads me to believe people are coming very generic and the value behind more traditional forms of communication are something that may be lost in the vastly increasing technological age. Although this is true I feel it is important that the convenience and opportunity that this form provides is not forgotten. People whom may not have had contact for months at a time in the past are now offered to have contact at the click of a button.
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