COM 125 BAZZAR!!

Friday, March 16, 2007

People always say that a picture speaks a thousand words. Look at the picture above, what do you see? What does it tell you? Well, when I first saw this picture, I feel that it presents the community. To me personally, a community is just like a web, everyone is linked to one another in everyway, be it online or offline. Should one day this web be destroyed, a new one will be 'built' up again in no time. These communities exist for a reason. A group of people will gather and connect with one another because they share the same interest In Singapore, we have places like the neighbourhood Community Centres where different groups of people come together for a certain event or activity they took part in. This is what we call "having something in common".

As technology advances, many people turn to the internet in search of their "kind" of people. They join online groups, forums, social networking sites etc to connect with people from all over the world. According to Wikipedia, a virtual community or online community is a group of people that may or may not primarily or initially communicate or interact via the Internet. There is not a need for strong bonds among the members in an online community. An email distribution list may have hundreds of members and the communication which takes place may be merely informational (questions and answers are posted), but members may remain relative strangers and the membership turnover rate could be high. This is in line with the liberal use of the term community (Wikipedia, 2007).

Truthfully speaking, the only online community I am more involved in is Friendster. Other than that, I guess I don't pay much interest in other kinds of social groups or forums that I could join. Due to this blog assignment, I had no choice but to join a social networking service known as Twitter. I was not sure in how it works and when I was done with the subscribing, I got quite annoyed that I have to keep updating on the same question " What are you doing?". After a while, I finally realised that it works just like a message board. I find it pretty interesting to be updated on what my friends were doing 5 minutes ago and so on.

Twitter allows its members to inform each other about what they are doing and what they think. It also enables users to send messages via phone or instant messaging (Wikipedia, 2007). I think it is clever to ask the "What are you doing?" question because that is what we normally ask our friends when we are bored. However, after spending some time in Twitter, I noticed that no one really cares about responding to the main question anymore. Everyone just message whatever they want to say or ask.

I feel that Twitter is definitely an online community because as noted by Rheingold, people in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, find friends, lots of idle talk (Virtual Communities, 1995) amd provide information at the same time as well. That was exactly what we were doing while my friends and I were twiting away in Twitter. Besides that, it was mentioned also mentioned by Jan Fernback and Brad Thompson the structural process that is associated with community is communication. Without communication there can be no action to organize social relations (Virtual Communities, 1995). In Twitter, communication is on-going every now and then. At times it might lag and slow down a little, but the "chit-chattering" never stops!

However, as compared to instant messaging and sms, Twitter does not have the edge because it is not that user-friendly due to the lagging. Besides that, with it being a website, it might need to be closed down for maintanence at some point of time, if so, where will we twit? That is something for us to think about. I think that Twitter will only be more popular if it stands out more uniquely then whatever we already had, like MSN, IRC, our trustable cell phones etc. Why will we want to continue using such service when we can just message our friends instantly and have them replied instantly what they are doing? Sure, it is interesting now to Twitter newbies like us, however, in the long run, would we still be that patient to reload the website every minute? Maybe we will find out this answer soon enough. At the mean time, happy twitting folks!

REFERENCES:

Virtual community. (2007, March 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:58 p.m, March 15, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_community&oldid=115277136

Twitter. (2007, March 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:47 a.m, March 16, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Twitter&oldid=115023086

Fernback.J & Thompson.B (1995, May). Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure? Retrieved 11:30 a.m, March 16, 2007, from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html

2:11 PMi hate HOMEWORKY

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