Group work

Our group project had the time of being trapped in defining “what are the elements of which a community is constituted?” but we decided during last week to move on to work separately to find our own examples of virtual communities and to see how they work out in their own different ways for their own different users.

For me, I am going to be looking at http://www.queeruption.org/
And to see how activism has been playing a vital role in binding people with different approaches, but, similar interests together as communities to work on projects that is potentially mutually beneficial for all participants.

For Daniela, she is going to look at Myspace, and argue that they are not actually a community as how myspace advertise themselves. Instead, it is used as a way of exhibiting, advertising etc.

And Karl is going to look at http://www.freecycle.org/
Freecycle is a good example of how an idea is enabled through Internet. The practice of providing things you don’t need for free to people who might need them has been spreading across more than 70 countries.
How trust between people is build through this website is interesting to look at. Subsequently we might say people’s location in the world in relation to how a community is composed of might be more flexible because of Internet.
This example is particularly useful because we are going to look at how certain terminologies, words changes meaning over the time. Such as our perception to the community, to the world, to the location, to the distances and to our relationships changes through the ways we communicate.