Week 4....A better day :)

Ok! So today was a lot better, I feel really confident with the group I'm working with and we have some good ideas already! Well.. we were a bit rusty with editing our group wiki at first but hey we got the hang of things at the end, and we are finally on a roll! Well... what I'm trying to say is we think we are on the right track now, we just need to do the research!

I started to think about whether I am apart of a community... well i dont really feel fully part of any community! My mum and dad being different religions (muslim and sikh.. pretty opposing!) has meant that I am lucky enough experience both although I find that when I am around a community of either I hardly feel fully a part of it. So is it possible to be in 2 communities... ok I guess this example is a bit of a difficult one to apply. But I agree with the fact that we are more individualistic and the variety and amount of online communities has meant that you can meet people with common interests and network with others without having to worry about ethnic, or racial prejudice and you can also be a part of many! I think that when you feel like you have a common interest with a group of people and you can engage with them and are happy to share ideas it makes you believe you are a part of a community.

I signed up to Second Life to experience it for myself, and I found it really interesting! The amount of places you can visit, and people you can meet made it a lot easier to engage with people than in real life. I call it 'real life' because although Second Life allows you to do what you can do in reality and more, it is still a virtual world. And to me no different from any other chat room on the internet. I do feel that the buying land, property and vehicles is a lot more to do with the entertainment side of it and to me using real money to buy something you can not physically use is rather OTT. However weirdly I could see the appeal in it, and prehaps if i looked back on my thoughts after 6 months of being a user I may understand how one can fully engage in it as if it were reality.. The only worry I have on it, is whether we are taking the easy way out, of living our physical life, meeting people physically and actually travelling... I am unsure as to whether there are users out there that live their Second Life more than their first but if this is the case I think this is a worry!

So last night... after having watched the repeat of panorama at 2am I decided to stay up and watch 'watch Dog'... and suprisingly they were speaking about online deception regarding social networking site Facebook. They had created a fake account on facebook called Amber (a bit like our group idea) and added 100 random people to be her friend, an interesting point is that people had actually accepted her friend request because they thought that they may know her, because on facebook people usually add only people they know..or so it seems. 35 accepted. Once they had accepted the request Amber the foney person was able to see their profile page and gain access to information such as their date of birth, hometown, phone numbers. Watch Dog exemplified just how easy it is for identity theft to occur on Facebook; just by the display of this personal information on your personal profile one can apply for credit cards and loans in your name. This came as a big shock to me! As I have this information on my facebook, so I imediately changed my settings ;) Here is the watch dog summary of it online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/watchdog/reports/internet/internet_20071024.shtml

Oh and I finally uploaded the pics onto the group wiki using html which i'm really proud about :D