Tutorial six: The internet and online communities

In this weeks tutorial we looked at online communities, I looked into facebook as my online community

The web adress is: www.facebook.com
This website is known as facebook

The focus of this is a free-access social networking website that is users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

What services are provided? how interactive is this site? how can people contribute?
Services provided on facebook are having your own page that allows you to add friends and send them messages, and update your personal profiles to notify friends about yourselves. Users can upload videos, pictures and send messages both publicly and privately. Publicly means that anyone who has access to your page can see what has been written. Privately is more like sending an email, it goes into the inbox where only you or the person receiving the message can see it.
On facebook people can contribute in many different ways, there are walls, this is a place on your page that is visible to anyone who is able to see that user's profile, depending on privacy settings which explains what activity has been happening on your page such as if you have added photos, commenting publicly to others and them to you, which new friends you have recently added and any other public information that you wish to share.
There is live feed which appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays of the user's friends.
Photos are where users can upload albums and photos. Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, this allows you to contribute your picture so you can share them with you friends.
This site allows people to contribute instantly to talk to their friends and family and also view pictures and see what they have been doing recently on facebook, this site allows peopele to be as interactive as they want.

The sorts of topics being discussed of face book primarily involve whats happening in their lives, social events, activities, what they are going to do in the weekend, where the are going etc, people are constantly updating their profile as their life events change or occur and conversations between friend. Then when other friend come online users are able to chat instantly.

As a facebook user myself, I use it as a means of communication between friends that I haven't seen in a long time and those close, I also use it to share photos and thoughts about what has been happening recently with my friends that are on facebook.

Material that is published may raise potential ethical issues such as false identity, someone going on facebook and pretending to be someone their not or pretending to be other person that they know without permission. There are many groups among facebook this may raise ethical issues as others may not agree with these groups as it is against their beliefs or values.

The benefits of this community are that it offers instant communication and people to become open about their different beliefs and values. It also allows people to connect over long distances instanly, and it can foster understanding and unity.

This online community doesn't offer face to face interaction such as a tradition community would. With this online community not all of the population on Facebook have similar cultural, religious and other charcteristic, the only similarity that everybody on facebook have an interest in this online community.