User talk:SoylentGraeme

Sending a message to myself as part of a class project in this talk page. I like films and football.SoylentGraeme (discuss • contribs) 15:31, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

To what extent are my online and offline identities aligned?


If we accept that “In everyday life, people consciously and unconsciously work to define the way they are perceived, hoping to engender positive impressions of themselves.”, then for our online selves we “are able to post only that information which presents a desired image” (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010, pg. 252) , and considering my own online and offline identities, while I would like to think that they are similar, if not the same, if I really look deeply I can see the differences. Even though I rarely take or post photos and all my feeds are relatively sparse, what has been posted online all paints a specific picture. It’s not necessary for someone to post a lot of content online in order for a certain impression to be created, since there will still be patterns and curation in this content. In my case, photos from a holiday or out at an event posted on my Instagram seem chosen to show that I was at a certain place, or that I am out enjoying myself, when in general my offline identity is preoccupied with sitting at home and watching films. My Facebook profile picture is me meeting film director John Carpenter, again giving an impression of someone who goes out and does interesting things and meets exciting people, when really that kind of thing is a rare occurrence. “The emphasis on profile building on social networking sites makes people strive to stand out from the rest as an individual” (Ibrahim 2018, pg. 47). While I can admit that my online content is largely curated, my online and offline selves would broadly align with each other. If you looked at my Twitter feed for example you’d see interest in film, football, Nintendo, certain TV shows, and so on, just as if you talked to me offline my interests in the same subjects would be clear.



Thinking about why our online and offline selves might be different, and why we might want to present a more positive image online, different to our offline self, I would consider the direct interaction through likes/comments/followers as one of the most important factors in an ongoing process of refinement and curation of any online output. “With digital culture we have a palpable sense of others constantly watching and rating us” (Ibrahim 2018, pg. 44) and we will curate our own output accordingly to yield the most positive results and ratings. Over time, as we learn what type of content attracts the most favoured sort of attention, we may see our online selves change to accommodate more of this type of output, “As these acts of expression and connection are performed to audiences, actual and imagined, identity becomes increasingly performative” (Quinn & Papacharissi 2017, pg. 354).

Since there are so many social networking sites with different purposes, we may even see the same person with differing online selves. On Facebook they may be presentable and reserved, since it’s how they keep in touch with family, while on Instagram they are showing the lavish and outgoing side of their lives, while on Twitter they vent freely and without restraint about anything and everything that may preoccupy them. Offline, we are (outwardly) as we appear, but online what we post is always managed and specifically chosen, and so, to me it’s clear that the online and offline self is entirely separate, the question is merely the depth of that separation.

Exercise #2 Responses
You present a strong case for online identities being a manufactured process. The deliberateness of every post allows for the user to create the exact image of themselves that they wish people to see. The extent of this varies and it is possible for a user to create a completely fabricated identity. Dorian Wiszniewski and Richard Coyne believe online identities tell us more about the desires, fears and interests of a person instead of their actual identity, akin to a metaphor. However, I believe if you were to take this approach when analysing someone's profile, it would reveal you a lot about the person's sense of self and personality. You mentioned you believe that the online and offline self are completely separate identities. I would argue that these identities often have a role in molding the other one. A user could try to match up their behaviour with the image they have curated online, letting the digital self bleed into the real world. What are your thoughts on the interaction between these identities? Digimedcult (discuss • contribs) 09:55, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #3
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007): The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of computer-mediated communication, 12(4), 1143-1168.

This article investigates different types of "social capital" and the ways they can be built through online communities, specifically Facebook. The authors conduct a survey of a random sample of 800 undergraduate students at Michigan State University, and analyse this data to determine the possible benefits in building social capital achieved through use of Facebook. The survey measured aspects of Facebook usage such as intensity, and took measures of psychological wellbeing and social capital to establish any links. The article is useful for my research topic as it investigates potential benefits of an online community, and establishes these benefits through analysis of its data. It’s a little limited in scope, with a small and not particularly diverse demographic of respondents, and may be somewhat out of date at 12 years old, but still hold relevant information. I will not base any conclusions on this article, but will use it to supplement any arguments toward positive effects of online communities.

What Are Wikis? What Kind Of Resource Are They?
There are many different types of wikis, with varying uses, such as Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia), Wikiquote (a collection of quotations) or Wiktionary (a dictionary and thesaurus). What these all have in common is that they are collaboratively constructed and can be edited by anyone, they are free, and they exist online. The software used to edit the wikis is in-browser, relatively simple to use and since wikis are built around communities, help is generally available should any editors run into any issues. Some, like Wikipedia, are incredibly vast, with a 2007 paper noting 282 million edits from over 7 million unique editors.



Wikibooks is another example of such a platform and exists as a resource of free textbooks and manuals. Once again it is community built and maintained, and free to access. Wikibooks placement as a Wikimedia project and on the Wikipedia homepage allows for high visibility and the potential for high amount of web traffic. It is important that pages on wikis are visible, as it has been proved that the higher the visibility of a page, the more edits and editors that will be involved, which will improve the quality of the output. Since wikis are always open to further edits, it’s feasible that a page can be continually improved with time.

A platform like Wikibooks is helpful to facilitate collaborative research as it allows many people to converge on a singular topic, offer their own inputs, research and insight and have all this knowledge aggregated and edited by a group of people. A person may encounter an article or book which is not so relevant to their own area of research but can share it with the group where someone more fitting can look into it further. Of course there can be difficulties if one personality is particularly overbearing and seeks to take an undue amount of control, or steer a project in an unwanted direction, but the rules and guidelines for Wiki construction (such as impartiality and apoliticality) are helping in curtailing this.

Wikibooks helps to foster a sense of community through its discussion pages, where questions can be asked and answered and any edits can be talked through and justified before, during or after they are placed on the topic page itself. Users also have their own discussion pages where other users can post and engage with them. Also, since each and every contribution of every user is recorded and easily accessed in a list of “contribs”, it’s simple to see how much a particular person may have edited a certain page/pages and what kind of quality these edits were. Other features of wikis are useful in collaborative work too, something as simple as the “View History” tab on each page offers a wealth of information. It allows a person to see how much may have been added to a page since their last visit, and directly click on which contributions they wish to look at. People can be tagged on pages and notified that someone has directly addressed them, and can also favourite specific pages making for ease of future access. All this works together to create a platform where resources are created by the community itself, and owned by everyone, in a digital commons. There is a sense of freedom in Wikis, since there is the potential to edit any page at all, and a variety of different types of wiki to edit and contribute too. However, there are restraints in what types of edits can be made (based on wiki guidelines) so the freedom is not total, wikis are not blogs or opinion pages, so personal freedom there is not absolute, but the information itself is free to access and edit.

INSTRUCTOR FEEDBACK: ENGAGEMENT ON DISCUSSION PAGES & CONTRIBS
Grade descriptors for Engagement: Engagement on discussion pages, and contribs of this standard attain the following grade descriptor. Whereas not all of the elements here will be directly relevant to your particular response to the brief, this descriptor will give you a clearer idea of how the grade you have been given relates to the standards and quality expected of work at this level:
 * Good. Among other things, good contributions will make a clear point in a clear way. They will relate concepts to original examples in a straightforward fashion. They will make effective use of the possibilities of the form (including formatting, links, as well as perhaps copyright-free videos and images, linked to from Wiki Commons). They may also demonstrate a broader understanding of the module's themes and concerns, and are likely to show evidence of reading and thinking about the subject material, discussing this in a transparent way with fellow researchers on the Discussion Pages. The wiki markup formatting will be very clear.

As instructed in the labs, and outlined in the assessment brief documentation, students should be engaging at least once a day, for the duration of the project. The following points illustrate how this engagement is evaluated.

Evidence from contribs to both editing and discussion of content (i.e. volume and breadth of editorial activity as evidenced through ‘contribs’). These are primarily considered for quality rather than quantity, but as a broad guideline:
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 3000+ characters are deemed “considerable”
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 2000+ characters are deemed “significant”
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 1000+ characters are deemed “substantial”
 * Items on a contribs list that are <1000 characters are important, and are considered in the round when evaluating contribs as a whole because of their aggregate value

Overall:
 * a number of smaller contribs dotted throughout project period, as well as a small number of slightly larger and one or two that would be described as significant, and one as considerable. Mainly activity revolving around annotated reading.

Engagement with and learning from the community on Discussion Pages
 * Evidence of peer-assisted learning and collaboration
 * Good
 * Evidence of reading, sharing, and application of research to the essay
 * Excellent
 * Evidence of peer-review of others’ work
 * Good

Reflexive, creative and well-managed use of Discussion Pages
 * Clear delegation of tasks
 * Satisfactory
 * Clearly labelled sections and subsections
 * Satisfactory
 * Contributions are all signed
 * Good

Civility. Your conduct is a key component of any collaboration, especially in the context of an online knowledge-building community. Please respect others, as well as observe the rules for civility on wiki projects. All contribs are moderated.
 * Good

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 15:39, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Instructor Feedback on Wiki Exercise Portfolio
Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly correspond to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is in relation to the making criteria as outlined in the relevant documentation, it should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band overall:


 * Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work.


 * This work is at the upper end of this grade band, and you dropped some marks because of missing elements (the peer-review element for Ex4 in particular) so perhaps a little improvement would go some way to attaining a higher mark. I think in order to engage with the wiki exercises a bit more, it might be useful for you to look at the Grade Descriptors and criteria in the module handbook to get more of an idea of how to hit those targets.


 * Making more use of the wiki functionality and markup would have gone a long way to improving fluidity and functionality of posts. I suspect that, if you become more familiar and proficient with the platform, that this would make a difference.


 * Re: responses to other people’s posts – these are fairly good, where submitted. Remember that the comments are "worth" as much as posts themselves. The reason for this is not only to help encourage discussion (a key element of wiki collaboration!) but also to get you to reflect upon your own work. This can all, of course be used to fuel ideas that might form part of your project work.

General:
 * Reading and research: evidence of critical engagement with set materials; evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material – all ok.


 * Argument and analysis: well-articulated and well-supported argument; evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position); evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections); evidence of independent critical ability – all ok, but with room for improvement, as your work tends to read a little too descriptive rather than analytical.


 * Presentation: fair use of wiki markup and organisational skills.

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 16:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)