John Perry Barlow suggests, although you are given the impression websites are diverse, i.e. – lot’s of options of forums for everyone to interact in! They are not actually that diverse as you as a user can select what topic you go into and ultimately who you engage with (i.e. you pick to engage with people who share that interest etc.) These forums allow you to seek a sense of Individualism; you are able to seek others who are like yourself.
In order to post to the forum you also need to have registered. You can ‘lurk’ without being a member, but contribution is aimed towards registered members. By handbag using a registration scheme, it means that users have to input personal details to the website. This potentially could be used for their marketing database.
However, the positives of having to do this means that when you are speaking to someone on the forum you know their ‘identity’ (whether it be real or not!) rather than having to speak to an ‘anonymous’ user and never knowing if you speak to the same person more than once etc.
When you register you get to select a ‘usernames’. These usernames are often not based around the person’s real name. Usernames such as ‘bibbitybob’ demonstrate this I think! Somebody once had a username that was something like ‘Kitten_Kat’ and she got called Kat even though her name was something completely different.
By choosing a nickname it means that people can present themselves how they wish as they are not tied down by their RL identity which they have had to inform the website about, they can play around with their identity if they wish too, obviously people can do this to an extent IRL, but not to the extent that they can online. In posts such as this http://www.handbag.com/forums/showthread.php?t=456354&highlight=meet they could really post anything! And people would probably believe that they are actually learning about this user’s true identity.
5 comments:
about the forum where the person wanted to know the other peoples true identity I thought it reminded me of the "trust" thing. when you want to trust someone it makes it easier when you can actually know something about a person.
Maybe it in this case however since there is not a question involves that requires trust maybe it has something to do with community feeling. Finding out who the other people are and seeing what you have in common with them...
Could this be teh reason for the question or just generak interest?
Yeah, I suppose you're right Sophia - that they do want to know something about the person so they have a sense of their identity and can resultingly trust them. Is it possible then for trust to be built without knowing personal details of someone? Bit of a thought there, thinking about it I am not so sure. Even though the chances are you could know 'fake' personal details, its still details which you either choose to believe or not isnt it.
That could be the reason for interest, and it could also just be general interest, I think they also like to see all the different types of people they have in the community. Perhaps it makes them feel happy to know they can associate with all these different people who do all these different jobs?
I agree with Sophia in so much they we come reserved in our response to someone that we do not know. This transpires IRL if were approached by someone for directions for example, yet are conduct online is less peronalised in terms of access (to physical sense of self) and so we feel it more acceptable to respond. I think this mainly based on the way have becomed socialised IRL - 'don't talk to strangers' based mainly on their physical attributes in relation to our own.
Yeah, you dont get people in waiting rooms all speaking to each other, but online these people might well just talk to each other!
It would be great to have this data for Adwords campaigns as well. Adwords has 'ad scheduling' but there is no way in analytics to see how the time effects the 'quality' of the visitors from adwords.
ecommerce web analytics
Post a Comment