Week 5...Lets get started!

Today was the lesson where as a group we tied up our ideas and chucked out the bit and bobs we thought did not fit well in our project! Today also gave us an idea of roughly how much we need to produce and the style in which we will write.

Ok so heres the idea... we are looking at identity online, and shall do this by analysing case studies. Why case studies? Well I personally think that this will provide a more interesting read, as we will be looking at real cases that can directly relate to the issues we want to address. So the first case study we are looking at is gender bending online - Beatrice has a friend who earns his living by pretending to be a sexy female online and on the phone!! We shall not only be focusing on this case but use it as an example and look at queer theories to analyse this aspect of gender identity online. Our second issue we want to look at is Myspace and the fake celebrity accounts on the site that people create to pose as someone they are not, some people fall for it and write messages thinking it is their fav star, some are unable to tell however this has brought into light postmodernist theorist Baudrillard's theory on the hyperreal - have we actually got to the stage where we can no longer distinguish what is and is not real? Is there a breakdown of the border between the real and the hyperreal? Again whilst looking at this we shall refer to a particular foney celebrity account to make it more fun!...thats if we can spot the foney one ofcourse or prehaps we will be fooled by simulacrums! (ha ha)
We were going to address the issue of online deception with a darker issue of paedophilia, which Hannah in particular was interested in researching, however looking at the way our project was heading we decided not to include it, as it would mainly be getting stuff out of newspapers and it would seem gloomy compared to the rest of the issues we want to look at which are more light hearted. The feedback after we reported to the class about what we set out to do in our project was that we were covering too much... I personally didn't agree with this, I think that we are being very specific at what we are going to look at and this in turn will give us a good, concise direction to follow without going off topic.

I was really shocked at the facebook book stats... I thought there were more students on there than professionals as it was open to only students first, however i guess that also makes sense seeing as there are now company networks, soon it may be as widely used as e-mail! I already find myself checking it more than my email!

I am enjoying the project, I just wish we didn't have as much work to do on the other modules so I could really spend more time on it, as it is really interesting to explore the virtual world. But either way our project is heading in a fun yet informative direction and it will be interesting to see how it turns out!