Week 3

Firstly i have to mention how unsure i was about this entire module.
It seemed as though just to blog was quite unnecessary, but then the project that I and my group, 'Alter Egos' are doing is based on online identity.
So, it is clear that this quite evidently interlinks with us blogging.
We all have created a blog page which we update on a weekly basis, allowing other users to view and share their comments. We get to personalize it by adding pictures of ourselves, which i have not got round to uploading as yet, and also have an "About Me" section... now you can't say i am reading too into this. Is this not an online identity in itself?

Moving on, to what we as a group have decided to set up, a bogus "myspace" and "facebook" account, for a male known as Joe. We are going to experiment on how many people add him and what comments they leave? This will show us how extreme or not an online identity can be.
Although this will not play a major role in our project, it will give us a clearer insight into other people's identity too. How, u say? Well firstly, what type of people add "Joe", if certain groups add him etc... or, it could go totally opposite, either way it will definitely open up more questions and hopefully give us some answers.

The group and I will be looking into how the social network has evolved from many years ago. For example when the chat rooms existed the only information available to the other person was their screen name, which in many cases at that time were made up.
Now we have all sorts of social networks that in a sense make it mandatory to fill in such gaps, before you start making friends so that you can read a person's profile and if you like it then you add them, if not you move on to another profile.
Because social networks have been around for a long time now, people are feel more comfortable in uploading their pictures for people to view, having their real names on screen, where as mentioned above, when the chat rooms started off, it was all so new to people and they were more aware of possible consequences, i.e fraud.

This is one of many things that our group will be looking into. Once we have gathered more information and research we can then elaborate on different types of identity, the dangers, and the positives, and how it all came about.