Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Week 3 Topic 1 (D+E), Cyber relationships

In my opinion I don’t think cyber identities constitute a normal social identity. For me the internet is used in order to communicate with friends I made in normal social reality. I have never made friends with someone who I have met online. I think that normal social reality is important for your lifestyle, for work, friends etc. By living your life through a virtual world you will lack the communication skills needed in the real world. This ties in with online relationships. Andrea Baker shows that relationships online can be the same as IRL, because of the communication that online allows such as, response time and style of writing etc, but this study doesn’t take into consideration the rest of Listers chapter on ‘network users’. These relationships are assuming that the users are completely honest and they are not miss-representing themselves. If the users are lying or exaggerating than the online relationships do not reflect ‘real’ ones. Though saying that offline relationships are not always truthful, but it is hard to lie about characteristics such as ethnic background etc. Some people find it easier to build up connections on the internet, because of the freedom it allows, so your more than welcome to disagree with me!
Posted by at
Labels:

3 comments:

  1. Hannahbanana4 February 2009 at 13:03

    can i ask you a question, did you get in touch with anybody through facebook that was coming to this uni before you came?
    I know some people did off our course and that is gettng in touch with people that you don't know?
    x

    ReplyDelete
  2. *Hannah T*4 February 2009 at 14:57

    I did, I met quite a few people online, two of which I now live with, and I still stay in contact with a few others.
    That is getting in touch with people you dont know, however, it was done in order to make meeting these people and moving to a new place easier.
    I see your point Hannah but I do think this sort of meeting is different, finding people on facebook became a first meeting, and the second meeting was in real life, there were no "pretend personas" as I dont think people are going to lie about themselves when trying to make friends in real life, they would just get caught out, maybe I'm wrong, but we were all in the same position when coming to university.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Claire Fisher4 February 2009 at 15:21

    i did have some random people adding me, but i dont actually speak to them. It would be hard for them to keep up their pretned personas on the inernet then met them as a 'real' person in real life. i think that people only conciously make up fake personas if they haave motiffs with something, eg a man acting like a younger woman.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)