High School PE all over again...

Amy Bruckman's essay 'Finding One's Own in Cyberspace' presented some dilemmas to me. Bruckman begins with a metaphor: choosing a virtual community is akin to choosing a restaurant. When choosing a restaurant you look to visual clues (how busy is it? what are the diner's wearing? what is the decor like?), word-of-mouth cues from friends and your own personal feelings and impressions about the 'vibe' of the place. Bruckman suggests that so too we should approach finding an appropriate online community: 'lurk' for a while to ascertain the nature/flavour of the site and its exchanges, try sites recommended by people with similar tastes and take cues from the structure, layout, and 'decor' as to the vibe of the community. I agree with her fundamental argument, that a user shouldn't feel that because a particular community is uncomfortable/not right for them, then there is no suitable community out there; but some of her thoughts on admission, selection and exclusivity within communities seemed elitist, undemocratic and needlessly dismissive.


While it may rankle an American pluralistic sensibility, the use of wealth as a social filter has the advantage of simplicity and objectivity: no one's personal judgement plays a role in deciding who is to be admitted.

Bruckman goes on to say that charging people a nominal fee per post discourages spamming and flaming and leads to a 'significantly raised level of discourse'. Well, my sensibilities are certainly rankled. I don't think that wealth is an objective, non-personal filter: someone somewhere at the creation of the community has to decide that wealth is to be the determining factor to be valued above all else. That is both a personal and subjective decision. Further, we are all taught about how empowering the internet is: it enables the boundaries normally present (geographic/social/religious/economic etc) to be traversed and overcome. Yet here is the promotion of one of the most difficult-to-overcome boundaries: socio-economic status. I recognise the need to develop means for reducing unwanted spam, flaming or inappropriate posts, but is the solution really to further emphasize the digital divide? I know that as a poverty-stricken student I wouldn't be able to afford to actively participate in a community that charged. But then Bruckman doesn't seem to like students... (See below).

Most MUDs are populated by undergraduates who should be doing their homework. I thought it would be interesting instead to bring together a group of people with a shared intellectual interest: the study of media.

Umm, well, RUDE! Especially considering the vast majority of people reading her essay are probably students!I visited the MediaMoo homepage because it sounded like an interesting platform for communication and discussion. Alas, I do not meet the requirements. However, if I were a post-grad, then I would. In the QUT context (and I'm sure many other universities) this seems wholly ridiculous, seeing as a number of subjects are exactly the same for under-grad and post-grad students (eg KCB336 New Media Technologies is also KCP336 New Media Technologies for gradual students: same lectures, same tutorials, same assessment). Also, since when did being an undergraduate mean that you didn't have valid and interesting ideas? Bruckman gives an example of a potential, valued member of her community as a librarian with eight years experience from a small town in Georgia. Yet a student, who is of necessity immersed in the latest principles/theories/developments, and who is also of necessity constantly researching the subject, should be excluded? Bruckman reasons this need for selection is to maintain a professional, collegiate atomosphere of peer-to-peer discussion rather than have MediaMOO become a didactic educational forum. Despite only being a lowly under-graduate, I have many ideas and theories that are borne out of the research and teachings undertaken in my course. And to openly suggest they are any less valid than the post-grad sitting next to me in KCB336 or a Georgian librarians is elitist and dismissive.

Of course, a creator or moderator of an online community is able to pick and choose the members to their heart's content. I'm just annoyed that I had to read her article as part of our course, yet am considered ineligible and inferior to then join the discussion.

It's kind of like choosing teams in high school PE all over again...