Friday, January 15, 2010

a sense of online community

I know I had a blog running already, however I have decided to post to two sites; this blog will be for completing class assignments for the CLAM course, while the other site will be a place where I can share my personal experiences abroad with friends, family, and my fellow CLAMers, found here.  This move will enable me to separate the fields of work and play, while still maintaing a strong link between the two sites as I foresee that much of the material will overlap.  Links between blogs of a different nature such as this are my way of attempting to structure the online community in which I am involved. As I am one of the millions who suffer from the affliction known simply as "facebook addiction," I look forward to coordinating by blog with my facebook community.  This community represents for me a way to expand the social network that I have established in the public world into my private life, not in a sense that it may feel like an invasion of privacy, but rather I can continue to contribute and build this community from my home or from a distance, even as far a distance as say Barcelona, Spain for instance.  As far as other forms of online communication and media that I have explored are twitter and myspace, although I never got too into either of those, and have since abandoned them.  Apart from facebook, the other large part of my role in the online community consists of my membership to several sites concerning music.  I am a member of a number of fan sites for certain bands, and the message boards on the sites are like mini communities for people with a very particular interest.  I also have recently discovered a site called bandcamp; here artists and bands are given a site, free of charge, to upload their music for other users to download, while simultaneously providing the artists with information about who is listening, what they're listening to, and how often each song or album is played or downloaded.  Within this site I have found many new bands, as well as many new friends willing to help and collaborate to create a positive movement in the music industry. All this being said, I am really looking forward to getting into the material of this course and learning about some fantastic ways of better communicating with the communities with which I am familiar, as well as some newly discovered sites.

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