Virtual moderation.
Hi guys, have never blogged before, so it’s all very exciting! The lecture today discussing Virtual Reality, I couldn’t help but think that no one brought up the fact that many chat rooms and other forums do have ‘moderators’. To my understanding- people who are there to keep the conversations regulated and hopefully stop it from becoming a free for all. They are often the founders of the forum or chat room (I may be wrong on this). The first time I used an online chat room I was around 14 and it too was a text forum. As I found anonymity and liberal thinking just some of the attractions. Although in saying this in regards to the clip played today with the two young girls, I couldn’t help but think that at the ripe old age of 15 maybe their levels of maturity and ability to distinguish between reality and virtual reality hadn’t quite reached its peak, the girls spoke about ‘falling in love’ and allowing themselves to become submissive through these technological mediums. This only depicts how dangerous and perceptive other individual’s can easily become. A knowledge of when to step back and ask yourself when enough is enough might have been needed in that situation. Virtual reality can be a great escapist medium, but it is just that Virtual. Moderation is the key.
Elyse.
Elyse.
posted by El at 7:13 PM
1 Comments:
I completely agree in your sentiments - it is precisely because of someone's inability to recognize the boundaries, which are certainly fragile, between what is real and what is not, that allowed the two girls to "suffer" and to be "victimized".
This has relation to the point I raised during the break today; Luke basically summarized everything down to things on a particular site/community being defined by its demographic. My much lengthier version - communities/webgroups/network sites contain people of various ages, life experience, and character nature. It is exactly because of this difference that produces an inability for an online community to function in the way as dictated by Turkle and Rheingold. Difference in age and life experience produce different human beings: as an Asian, growing up in NZ was certainly alot different when compared to a native Pakeha. There were difficulties and observations made that some people cannot even begin to comprehend, and in turn, vice versa.
If we wanted to make this a bit more realistic - take this very blog as a starting point. In contributing to this blog, we ourselves have formed a community, albeit one that is grounded in real life, but a virtual community nonetheless. [Hopefully] the entire 'lot' of us are adults, comfortable with technology and are able to adapt basic intrinsic philosophical ideas to technology. In this, we have created a "virtual community" that discusses topics and ideologies. Although we are bound to this through RL (our marks), it does force us to be able to dis/agree with each other's PoV, through rational debate. Not only so, but the fact that we have people from all sides of life, it allows us to bring perspectives to the table that might seem absurd or highly unorthodox. In that perspective, than, our "virtual community" is a success!
By the way, for anyone who wanted more info on Rheingold, there's an article on Project Muse (accessible through the library database system) called "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy
The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community" by Fred Turner. A lot of background info!
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