kaymac poster

When I was in fifth grade I had a penpal via email. It was my fifth grade teacher's niece (so no weird creepy guys...). That was my first experience with email correspondence. The first computer that my family owned had a black screen with green type. There was only a word processing program and a flight simulator game that let you take off, fly, and then land.

I couldn't help but laugh when reading this article because it was talking about the Internet back in what? 1993? I think that they were foreshadowing social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace and even lesser-known ones like Purevolume, although that focuses more on music.

I think that this quote sums up what is going on in the internet of our world.

"...the internet and virtual reality open the possibility of new kinds of interactivity such that the idea of an opposition of real and unreal community is not adequate to specify the differences between modes of bonding, serving instead to obscure the manner of the historical construction of forms of community" (Poster, 542).

With these social networking sites, our communities have changed. Instead of of a letter taking forever to reach somebody (I just sent a letter to Vancouver three weeks ago and it finally reached its recipient yesterday), you can have the assurance of instant contact with somebody in China. There's no excuse of the letter getting lost in the mail, you know that the recipient will receive it instantly.

So would Myspace and Facebook be categorized as this "unreal community"? I beg to differ, because I think it has created a different type of community that's not unreal. It can't be categorized as real in the sense of meeting up with somebody in a coffee shop and having a physical conversation, but I think that the type of interaction in social networking sites has created a new kind of community that has yet to be defined.