The Virtual Community

I started a Facebook account two years ago. I must admit for the first two or three months I was quite obsessed about it. My kids even got a little leery of my activity. My oldest would recite statistics about people putting more value on virtual relationships than real ones. I was a bit embarrassed. Like the article Identity and Deception in Virtual Community addresses our physical self: one body, one identity.
My physical self was a newly divorced mother of six and was home alone most of my time. I worked part-time and went to school full-time. I felt like I was invisible most of the time.
When I started my account I did not know at all how it worked. I started to get all these friend requests and just accepted them all. Half of the people I did not know who they were. I was in a sense just collecting and counting the number of friends I had. I was creating my virtual self. I was catching up with old friends, classmates, relatives and old boyfriends I thought I would never see the rest of my life. I could include the positive great part of my life, leave out the crap. I eventually had to put the brakes on. A close friend of mine and I started figuring out what was private, what was public, I started deleting the people I really did not know. We started looking into the “usernet environment,” as the article calls it.
It was at this point that I really started to look at what I now know is the “Social Network.” I realized that the people I went to high school with that I thought were total geeks were actually quite interesting from their posts on Facebook. This is were I noticed, like the article talks about, that people were establishing their identity and often had issues that they were presenting or wanted to have a forum to write about their political views, social views, or moral views. It was a place were they felt they had a voice. As the article states, “There are people who expend enormous amounts of energy on a newsgroup: answering questions, quelling arguments, maintaing FAQs.”
This article was quite an eye opener as to what we are involving ourselves in concerning social networks. Too many of us enter into this virtual world blindly without realizing the consequences of our involvement.
This article was a great information tool on the virtual community.