Planning...

This week involved the first stage in the process of completing our group project: planning – as the title of this entry indicates.

Elom, Karl, Neng and I have now determined the themes we would like to cover in our group project on virtual communities. I won’t go into much detail here in order to avoid being repetitive as I will post the (first) proposal of our project plan as it (at the moment) also appears on our group wiki page later on.

In brief, we have agreed upon covering the following:

1. give a definition of the term ‘community’ and look at what constitutes a virtual community,
2. discuss the local-global nexus in regards to cyberspace,
3. and examine the possible motivations (such asnarcissism, confirmation, etc) of people joining virtual communities (such asQueeruption, MySpace, Facebook, etc).

The summary above might sound a little vague and is explained in more detail in the project plan. I also think some themes will consolidate once we have completed our research.

In order to relieve the work load and thus work more efficiently, I suggested to my fellow group members that we could divide the topics between the four of us. One of my group members however objected to this and pointed out that each of us might arrive at different readings of the same text. This will then enable us to form a more balanced argument on virtual communities. Whilst I recognize the validity of this argument, I fear that the time we have at our disposal might not allow us to do so. We will have to find a plausible solution of how to best approach this problem soon, in particular to avoid all of us concentrating on researching the same topics and as a result ending up with insufficient information on others.

Unfortunately I also have to point out that we already seem to be experiencing communication problems. The attempt to communicate via e-mail so far has proven somewhat problematic. It might therefore be worth picking a day for us to meet in person and exchange our ideas and thoughts on the project that way.

We have also decided to put a picture of ourselves on our group wiki page. I have to say that as yet I’m quite pleased with how easy it appears to be to construct (or rather edit) the wiki page (*touch wood*). Nonetheless, our creative abilities will clearly be challenged. At present I’m not satisfied with the design of our page and, as it was me who posted the project plan onto the page, I am willing to take full responsibility for that.