2011年11月29日 星期二

Social Networking and Online Identities

1. What is identity?

Identity is come from Latin: identitas (“sameness”), is the relation each thing bears just to itself. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and social identity. An entity can only be fully identical with itself. Any difference gives rise to a separate identity. Thus identity is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from other entities. Also, Identity refers to the fact of being who or what a person or thing is, the characteristics determining this. (Wikipedia)




2. Interview classmates:


a) How many online identities do you have? What are they like?
-Venus: 3emails

-Minnie: 4emails

b) In what ways are they different to your “in person” identities?
-Venus: communication tool with friends on the Internet through Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, etc
-Minnie: (same as Venus) to communicate with friends through many different media such as email, msn, facebook.

c) What are some benefits of expressing one’s identity online?
-Venus: For expressing her love towards the person she loved, she set her identities by using the nickname of that person.
- Minnie: She set her identities base on her nicknames and her favorite stars.
Although, the identities may look a bit differently, all of them are things related to me.

d) What are some risks?
-Venus: some villain may steal her online identity/account and enter into them, and use her account to do illegal things, like online shopping, making deal with others.
-Minnie: if her identity is used by some bad guy, they may deceive her friends and harm them.

On your blog write a two paragraph report on a class member who has an interesting set of online identities (you may use pseudonyms ie fake names)

Nowadays, as facebook is becoming more famous, some people will use it to do bad things. For example, they will use fake account to create a fake identities like someone is boy but set she is a male in the account or use some handsome boy’s photo to pretend he is a boy with good looking, so that he can easily to meet girl on the face book.

Also, some of them will use facebook as a business promotion tool. They will
Create a company account in facebook and add many friends as it could online, so that the company can have many sales targets to promote its product. Some of them will pretend they are your friends by using a fake person identity on facebook. But his/her purpose is to sale the product of some company.




3. An example of an online digital artwork that explores identity:
Mouchette: www.Mouchette.org. Refer to Tribe and Jana, 66-67

a) Description
- subject matter
This is an artwork that the artist Martine Neddam uses a French girl who was raped and committed suicide as a virtual character and use the first person narration to express her point of view for this incident. In the website, she used a close up photo of a flower as the background, and it symbolize the girl’s innocent. Also, flies symbolize death.

- types of activities invited by the site
This website have many hyperlinks such as ‘name’ and ‘Tokyo’ for us to click and explore more information about the website. Also, we can leave our feedbacks one the website so that we can express our feeling or opinions and we can know the opinions of different people’s perspectives towards the same thing. 

- style eg. colours, composition of pages/screens
The colors of the main page are colorful, but for the other pages are in black and red color only, so those to create terrible feeling. To make the audience focus more on the content, the composition and layout of the pages are in a simple design.

- Mood
May be the creator want to express the negative emotions. There are many terrible laugh sounds, and the color tone is wired, deadly, the whole website’s mood is horrible and sad. I feel very uncomfortable when checking this website.


b) the work is controversial because…
- Published comments
Most of the people cannot accept this website. Because it includes some terrible elements like a horrible taboo, blood and­ scared sounds are included. They think it is horrible and they don’t like it. Some of them want to explore it. Also, some people wanted to know whether it was created by a 13-year-old girl.

- classmates’ opinions 
Some of them think that is horrible to check, they refuse to see it again, because it includes weird terrible pictures, sounds and color tone. Some of them are interested in the story and willing to click the hyperlinks and discover it. Some of them think that it is too simple.

c) A conclusion
http://www.mouchette.org/ is a website that make some of people( including me) feel scared and uncomfortable. Because it is a website that expressing the unfortunate dead of a poor French girl. The website includes some flower pictures, terrible laugh sounds, and wired color tone, and simple sentences describing the accident. Also, the website also provide space for viewers to leave comment on this serious things. I think it is a controversial artwork on the Internet.





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