Week 6 Tutorial - Terry Flew's "Virtual Cultures"

How do online cultures organise themselves?

In the article New Media: An Introduction, Terry Flew discusses how online and offline cultures organise themselves. He suggests that the Internet has never been strictly a mechanical process, rather something that has always benefited from social influence and human engagement. It is with this reasoning that he claims online culture is not a separate entity, rather one that integrates and co-exists with our 'real life' culture.

In class I was asked to relate this to my own personal Internet usage to see if I agreed with Flew's statement. This was an eye-opener, because I have never considered myself to have an 'online culture'... I don't play warcraft, I don't use Secondlife... I surf the net all the time out of interest and for uni, but apart from email, my only social networking was in places like facebook. This however, is where I found my offline and online cultures converging. I thought about how the main purpose of facebook is to interact with people, especially those I've lost touch with since finishing school. This departs completely from it's virtual mechanism aspect and focuses more on blurring the line between virtual correspondence and real life interaction. In other words, although some of us participate in a virtual culture, a lot of the time it is based on social relationships and/or previous human interaction.

I found this weeks reading and tute material particularly interesting. And now here I am with a blog! I suppose now I can consider this part of my ever-growing virtual community.

Refererence:
Flew, Terry. (2005). Virtual Cultures in Flew, Terry, New media : an introduction, Melbourne: OUP, pp.61-82.