Week Five

I was late to this class unfortunately and missed the start, but was filled in by my group who said that more information about the brief and project was given and thy passed it on to me. I jumped into the discussion on online profiles and the impact they can have on our lives, which I found very interesting. It is very true that today almost everyone has an online presence but not very many people put much thought into how it affects them in the real world. In the world today social media is often seen as just an extension of yourself, like another limb and people forget that information that is posted can be online forever or can be saved and stored by anyone. One comparison that I found particularly interesting is that to the alternate personas one might have when talking to family compared to talking to friends. In the same way our online persona is not a true reflection of ourselves. Weather this is a bad thing is an interesting debate. On one hand showing your best self is a positive thing, as it can encourage others to be their best self. On the other hand however, this can make people feel inferior or like they can never be as happy or fulfilled as those they see online, when in fact those people might be struggling with the same issues deep down that the viewer is.

We had a quick meeting before class to discuss how we would continue with the project. Again the turnout was not great as it happened to be a very busy week for other projects. We talked about how we might divide up the topic and other related things that could go into the presentation. I was finding meeting in SL frustrating as without being able to see the other person in real life you cannot get immediate feedback in a conversation, meaning getting a point across is often slower and it is hard to know how people feel about what you have to say. This wasn’t too much of an issue but it definitely slowed things down. We also discussed the types of content we might put in, audio, video ect..