Lesson 2

Digital Identity Part 1

Social Networking and the creation of Self Online.

Identity is what makes a person who they are. It could also be perceived as who you project online. It can also stand for who you are not and instead who you pretend to be. This could also been seen as your 'Persona' which is when a person plays a role, either to fit in or just to act.

The things that make up a persons identity could be seen as many things, from Race to hair color to gender. As well as eye color. The other things to think about nationality, friendships, music taste, sexuality, appearance, student status, family, relationship, religion etc.

How does a person see Gender (in terms off biological sex)? Could it be through what a person once was? Body shape? Mannerisms? What about a persons genetics vs our upbringing and what we've learned. What about how we eat? And when we eat culturally.Our emotions too play into this. It reminds me off the the boy who was born and had his genitals cut off.

How do we define what race is? Is it due to our culture? Is it due to the color of our skin? Of because of our past experiences? Our Trauma plays a big part in our Gender and our race, but our History is what plays the biggest role.

Lesson 1

What is Network Culture?

A networked culture can be described in many terms, starting with being part of a social website, for example MySpace, Facebook, Flickr or Tumblr. It is all about being part of one big connected society. The coming blogs shall be looking into how society has evolved through the internet over the years, and if it is doing more to help us against making things worse when it comes to people interacting with each other.

In this first lesson, the class discussed different ways that people are connected. We spoke about how a large number of people in the world are connected to Facebook, a social website that has almost everybody connected and is almost killing off the mobile phone in terms of instant messaging. There are also video and photography websites where we can see so much that different people have to offer in terms of outlooks, opinions and artwork.

The first lessons main task was to find an example of this. An example of Twitter was shown, a website where people post public messages that are known as 'tweets' that are instantly corrected by others that sit and watch the 'twitter feed'. I wondered how these people are spending their life's correcting others.

This should be seen as a great example of how the world is connected through the internet and shows how people have become diluted and tainted by the mistakes of others, almost possessed into correcting people. Somehow they must be convinced that they can get their hands on money, or even online popularity through correcting those that they find worthy.

The class also dealt and discussed Old Technology vs New Technology and touched briefly on the subject. The nature of 'Text', 'Reader' and 'The Audience' has changed drastically between 1990 and 2000. Mainly because of YouTube and User-generated, Low-Tech stuff. The class spoke about how people were used to slow, yet convenient but have become jaded by the Quick/Instant internet of today. Life online has changed from tactile, more personal to becoming less Personal. This also tied into our discussion about private against Public/social/sharing sites.

One of the main things that promoted and pushed public/social sharing sites were when things went wrong in life. 9/11 was the best example, when things became too real for even television to show, the internet and social media came to the rescue. People who were scarred and had recorded it on their phones were the ones that the press went too for their information.