COM 409 Intro and CH1

Well hello, we are back again. My name is Greg Aitken and I am a senior here at Reinhardt. I have family mainly in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, but other parts of the US as well.

I can not say that I am an early adopter as far as technology comes. I do not enjoy being on the computer, but I will admit that, once I got a smart-phone, my life was changed. Having that much information at my fingertips was truly an amazing experience for the first time. I feel like the next generation should be brainiacks. They are getting smart-phones at young ages, but I am not sure if they are being used to their

maximum potential.

I avoided Facebook and Twitter for as long as I could, but as soon as I bought a smart-phone, I was forced to give in. The inter-connectivity online is a remarkable aspect of the internet. Although I am not active on Facebook and am minimally active on Twitter, I find their services quite useful. I have been able to find friends from different places that I have lived and have been able to follow comedians and athletes on Twitter (@GregoryMcBeth).

Reading through the first online reading, I learned a lot about online cybercultures and what a cyberculture is. I interact in cyberculture all the time, but did not really know what it was. I am a member of xbox live, which is an online gaming cyberculture. You are able to create avatars which can represent you in the online world.

When I think of cyberculture I almost immediately think of the movie "The Matrix" and the concept behind that movie. In the movie, the fact that you can have a mental projection of yourself to plug into the matrix, the same goes with xbox live avatars. You can create an avatar to resemble yourself all the way down to its clothes.

Another topic and stat that interested me is that of the digital divide. The stats on population and internet usage and their correlation is fascinating because they do not go hand in hand. The countries with higher internet usage are not the most populated, in fact, the opposite is true in some cases.

Because there is internet usage, although not as prevalent in some countries and nations, there must be some kind of monitoring system to regulate cyberspace. There is a governing term which is used to describe the set of rules known as protocol.

A new term, cyberfeminists, stuck out to me as well. Cyberfeminists "seek to feminize cyberspace by ensuring that the technology is appropriated for their use" (CC 18). One website that is particularly geared towards women is Pinterest. This site seems like a cyberfeminists definition of technology appropriated for female use.

Cybercultures are popping up all over the internet. The interconnectivity of the internet and the ability to communicate over so many different mediums makes cybercultures more of a world culture than an internet culture. Although the internet is a global culture, it seems so much smaller and more connected than the actual world does.