Communities

I have a bad habit of limiting my Internet experience and am an extremely slow adopter to the online communities for a social outlet; I only use them when required for communication or for a class. A community that is completely mediated by the Internet is my online course for one of my comm. classes. I am actually taking two courses right now that are completely reliant on the Internet as a means of all interaction. If you wish to obviously speak to a person face to face it can be arranged.

Within the group we have several discussion boards and the option to email the professor. The only disadvantage, in my opinion is that there is no real interaction between students, not even in the discussion boards. We tend to post, leave it be and just add new threads, not elaborate on the existing.

The experiences that I have had online are limited as far as making actual bonds or connections with people. I do have a very limited association to my other class mates, but it usually focuses strictly on academic issues at hand. I do have to say in comparison to other more casual Internet communities common bonds and relationships are formed. In these less formal sites people are more likely to seek out this pseudo friendship in Internet communities.
"While some participants believe that people should only indicate meaningful relationships, it is primarily non-participants who perpetuate the expectation that Friending is the same as listing one’s closest buddies"(Boyd). Boyd's statement about 'friending' is more supportive of the notion than I am, I wouldn't even call them just a list of buddies but rather, for some, a list of anonymous people that you might only talk to a few on a regular basis. Boyd furhter explaines why all of these so called friends come from. "Saying no to someone can be tricky so some prefer to accept Friendship with someone they barely know rather than going through the socially awkward process of rejecting them"(Boyd). I think this is more commonplace on internet communites than anything, at least in the myspace realm.

This opinion I have of Internet communities is only due to my experience of people not responding or the painstaking anticipation of those 'oh so meaningful responses'; I would rather just call the person on the phone. I guess you could say I lack patients. You would assume that instant messaging would be a solution for a person like me, and it does help...but I do not live on the computer and neither does everyone else. Unless you set up a meeting time it can be hard to catch people.

I do wish that my online courses were a bit more relationship oriented, I think I would ask more questions and feel more confident about my work. There is almost no collaboration or even communication among peers- I think it could be much more interactive if everyone or the professor took the initiative to create the proper medium for our communication to take place.