It’s been a strange week in my lifestream. Last week was very much focused on finding information on ethnography and on online communities, with an emphasis, once I had decided to look at Mumsnet, on all things woman and blogging/chatting. This week though has been one of magpie activity…the collecting of shiny things! I’ve continued to look at Mumsnet and other sites, but I didn’t want to stream any comments from chat into my lifestream as, although the chat is public, I felt it was intrusive to stream personal conversations into my blog. And so I began collecting shiny things – anything that attracted me to it and that I wanted to keep. I had been inspired by Neil’s project the week before to record all his activity online rather than to just focus on anything relevant to the course. I’m not sure I quite did that, but I did decide to stream anything that was more broadly relevant to the course, rather than just on this block’s focus.
Most of these ‘shiny things’ have been collected through Stumbleupon which, as I said last week, appealed to my sense of the random. However, it also got me thinking about what digital culture is and provides us with. If there is the opportunity for community, as we have been considering the last few weeks, or, as Bell points out, the threat of destroying what little RL community we have left, what does the vastness of the internet leave us feeling. If the internet represents an opportunity to experience and connect with, not just other people and cultures, but also a new kind of (digital) culture, then does its vastness and speed of change and usage –
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/7iJEVG/www.go-gulf.com/60seconds.jpg
mean that I am just as limited in my ability to experience it as I am by my ability to experience the physical world? The ability to explore (money aside!) is dictated by knowledge. If I do not know what to look for, then how do I find something? I think Stumbleupon is useful for this but obviously has its own limits – I found a lot of sites it took me to were entertaining but, ultimately, nothing more. One site – http://www.makeuseof.com/ - had some practical information but it’s section on ‘geeky fun’ was a looming black hole that it was easy to fall into and, ultimately, procrastinate over.
On a more serious note, I find myself streaming a fair amount from the Guardian such as the article on social media censorship in China. This spoke to issues of online communities as the Communist party struggles with the ‘growing boldness of microblog users’ . Having experienced the lack of social media in China on a trip last year, I found it, at first, very strange to be unable to keep in touch on Facebook. Within a day or two though of trying to go through proxy servers (blocked) I became entirely unconcerned. However, the issue is not whether the loss of Facebook is really an infringement of freedom (one can feel quite ‘freed’ without it) but where censorship might be used to quash community discussion and activism – this took me back to thinking about Hand in week one and his discussion of the utopian/dystopian and the political use of Web 2.0, and to what freedoms digital culture might afford us. Perhaps we often confuse choice with freedom.
