Week 3 :)

Things have become a little more clearer now, I met with my group and we began to discuss issues we would like to research into for the project.
We created a group name 'Alter Egos' and a group Wiki http://www.alteregos.pbwiki.com/.

We were looking into ideas of identity and manipulation, within online communities and chat forums. To put this into practice we are in the process of creating a dummy account for popular networking sites myspace and facebook, just to see how someone who's identity does not exist in reality can be perceived and accepted online. In doing this we can judge just how many people would want to be friends with our 'joe blog' without having met him, but only from what they have read on his profile. Ofcourse this will not give us enough evidence or information to form our whole argument, however it is a practical experiment that we can include and refer to in our project.

There was also another area that we would like to explore, this is the shift from chat rooms to social networking, I remember about 8-10 years ago when chat rooms were so popular. However more recently there has been a trend in joining a social network, this is because they allow users to give a detail potrayal of themselves, with photographs, profiles, and also allows other viewers to see how many friends they have. The amount of friends one has seen to be an important factor on sites like myspace and hi5, as many people strive for as many friends as they can get, and often this means using friend generators. However networking sites like facebook it is harder to find people you don't know and profile pages are not as public as on myspace. After having hi5 myself, I felt that I had grown out of it and moved on to facebook which was more about keeping intouch with people you knew. It is almost like growing out of a process of social networks, hi5 and bebo tend to be for a younger age group.

I am interested in how postmodernism fits into identity online, in particular Baudrillard's theory on hyperreality and the idea of virtual worlds being a simulacrum of reality. This is something I shall read into further.