First Lesson and Joining a Virtual Community

January the 28th was my first multimedia class and I found it both very difficult to understand but very interesting at the same time. For the first time ever I created my own web page (looked extremely basic yet I looked upon it like a piece of art..big lol I know). To do this we had to use all these codes that represent what the page layout, colour and text will be like. I found it funny that I kept on making mistakes because I kept spelling colour the British/English way and the program was American.
After learning this, our group was more confident and started to design our website. I just hope it won’t be pink as we’re all girls. Apparently this lesson was the first lesson we finally gave each other tasks to be completed by next week so I guess I came to lesson just in time to be an efficient contributor. If you’re reading this girls, I promise to make you proud!
So, for this week I’ve been looking at different virtual communities and I found the most popular ones to be the most interesting ones for me. So I joined one to get a really good understanding of this new found world. After considering and narrowing my options (Facebook, Bebo and Myspace) and deciding what seemed most appealing in terms of technological simplicity, I of course joined Facebook and after only a few days I seem to have more friends on there than I think I do in reality. Wow, virtual communities are really a happier place. Upon joining I was able to customise my profile and tell everyone how unlucky I’ve been so far in life. The strangest aspect of Facebook was my friends. For some reason I found their personalities had been slightly altered, whether for their own or other’s satisfaction. One friend, who I know pretty well but won’t mention her name for obvious reasons (not because of privacy but I don’t want to actually loose her), had this complete other personality on Facebook. In reality she was a very shy, timid and not particularly vain or overly popular individual yet on facebook she was wild. I’m telling you I was gob smacked. She had a total of 92 photographs of herself and some were even professionally taken; these increased daily and became more confident and even pornographic. Her profile was filled with messages from different guys debating with her about endless topics. This was the biggest shock as I think I’ve only seen her speak to men on two occasions, once was to ask for the time and the other was to ask for the time. This got me thinking, these communities, are they therapeutic or damaging? Is this particular girl overcoming her anxieties or is she still hiding them and creating her imaginary preferred self on Facebook? Anyway I hope I find my answers through this module. I’ll get back to you on that.