So throughout week 7 the main theme of discussion was what communities are online and what governs them. In summary online communities and the way we work online is more flowing than stories where there is a clear structure, online communities don’t necessarily have an end point, they can just be things online and the conversation around them. e.g. video from youtube that just explains things isn’t necessarily a story.
Furthermore the networks we engage with shape our views connection between politics and art, everyone can contribute, and everyone can have a voice to these political ideas.
This has the ability to impact our online experience, the emergence of new platforms and it gives audiences an idealised version of the internet. We were told to think about and consider the factors at play in US campaign for example trumps twitter campaign. When we discuss our own engagement with these source of the US government onto media we find that the relationship between audiences and media is quite influential. These sources are shown to us through social media platforms in particular Facebook, where new stories in particular are shared, liked, linked. This has shaped our view of him because he is constantly presented in a negative light, he’s on memes, edited videos, photos, news stories in general the new hasn’t really constructed his representation positively. Due to the extent of this and my constant interaction with Facebook I’m constantly exposed to trump as a selfish, racist, sexist, ignorant man. He’s exposed as very uneducated and egotistical, a news story in particular that popped up on many of my social media platforms is trump videos and memes and things that he said 7/11 instead of 9/11. Likewise other new such as the 60 minutes team, it’s interesting to note how in the past to find out about news stories you’d have to buy the newspaper to now having to simply check Facebook and the news is always liked or linked and the major news stories are always shared almost that its unavoidable. Which again just heightens and allows the story to grow because the more people that know about it the more people talk and interact with it. This shows in a way the commercial influence impacts on our experience online, the emergence of new platforms and effects our idealised vision of the internet. A part of the reading that stood out to me and the links in here is how Facebook is based on the promotion of identity. Just like personal pages organisations and political pages for example are expressions of identity but showcasing the organisations beliefs and story also inclusive of links and web pages to other sources.
We also considered what a community is ?
- values, you share similar viewpoint and beliefs
- participation within a conversation, its not just one way, its an interaction and all combine ideas, thoughts and feelings.
- sense of a shared experience, not a hierarchy of people we all share a common stance and thus experience of a particular topic or medium.
For the last part of the workshop we continued finding our communities for Assessment Task 2. I really struggled the past week or so with trying to find an online community. My intention has been to find a space or group that discussed Film and TV production and trying to find an interactive space that includes that has been challenging. Blogs and websites, even Facebook pages have been all one way and not really what I am looking for, So Hannah mentioned they’re might be like Melbourne groups on Facebook for production so I looked into it and found “Woman in film and TV, Networking in Melbourne”, its a closed group so Im currently awaiting to be accepted. However this seems like a great start and hopefully this can be a community that I can interact with. The group itself is just under 500 woman so its an average sized community not overly large but expansive enough that interacting will be worthwhile.