smiley is 25
September 20, 2007 — kittentVirtual communities-a ramble
September 20, 2007 — kittentWish I could attend class tonight. I just went through the presentation on VC’s (very quickly) and I’d love to hear the perspective of younger students on virtual community, as I found one in 1991 that still impacts my life today (goddess bless usenet and alt.callahans*).
I imagine that Nancy Baym’s book Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (ISBN: 0761916482) would seem kind of old fashioned now, even though it was published in 2000.
WoW (World of Warcraft) isn’t that far from The Matrix. City of Heroes lets people become fantasies.
Blogging gives me a sense of sharing professionalism. On the internet, no one knows you’re a cat.
Different communities treat”n00b’s”differently. It’s not that long ago that the net was controlled by engineers, geeks, the military and secretaries…and then everyone got AOL and September never ended.
Live Journal is like Usenet only more selective. Unless a newsgroup is/was moderated, anyone could participate. It was like a dozen conversations at once (especially with a threaded newsreader). In LJ you read your friend’s journals and they read yours, literally, as you can make an LJ “friends only” and keep people out.
Live Journal, Facebook and other Social Networking tools connect people who would have never met otherwise.
John Scalzi’s blog Whatever is one of the longest running blogs on the net and he has an additional blog, By the Way at AOL.
The Millennials are the Net.generation. They see the world differently. Never unconnected. Laptops, cell phones, Ipods.
To paraphrase Bill Mischo (head librarian at Grainger Engineering Library-UIUC) “What is the role of local collections? Digitization seems to make local collections meaningless.” [he was speaking at the faculty meeting about the digitization project.] one of the things UIUC is doing is digitizing unique items from the Rare Book and Special Collections library, which will give access to people who normally wouldn’t have it.
The above is stream of consciousness so grammar, punctuation and logical thought are not necessarily a given.
