Net102 Essay 2 - The big one

This essay was the most challenging assignment I've had to complete so far. Below is an unedited copy of the submitted and marked essay. Mark: Distinction


Virtual Communities allow forms of identity and social relations that are unconstrained by our bodies, space and time.


Through the evolution of the tethered “always on/always on us” self, the separation between offline and online has converged, the ‘self’ now occupying the space between the physical and the virtual. (Turkle, 2006). Without the constraints of a physical body the virtual self is enabled to move through the online space and is presented with the opportunity to connect with communities that are diverse and unconstrained by time and space.  The online community of Second Life allows individuals to find community within a simulated online world, intimacy can be uncovered for young people considering their sexuality and believers are able to access the Australian mega church community of Hillsong through ‘new’ technologies - through these examples I will evaluate the ‘self’ and how virtual communities allow forms of identity and social relations to form without the constraint of our bodies, time and space.

Communities, both online and offline form through the need for people to connect and share with others.  Shafi points out an online community can be "… different people from different parts of the world establish a virtual community in cyber space. Here they share their ideas, opinions, belief, political perspectives, interests etc. …" (2005), this concept of community has enabled people to discover each other as they would not have in an offline setting. The growing mobile connectedness to the Internet via handheld devices further encourages the apparent removal of spatial separation, promoting a sense of presence, that people are there for each other in a way similar to offline face to face interaction. (Slater, 2002). The removal of spatial separation, takes us a step closer to truly fulfilling Marshall McLuhan’s concept of ‘the global village’, within which we are simultaneously connected, receiving information and contributing. (Dixon, 2009)

The online gaming environment of Second Life allows players the potential to create for themselves an alternate ‘second life’, whilst contributing to the Second Life world. Within the game, there is a large selection of potential avatars, jobs, communities and religions for a player to align with.  PussycatCatnap a Second Life player and blogger recently blogged ‘Second Life needs to own what it is; a video game. Denying that puts it in a strange middle ground where it cannot get any traction’ (PussycatCatnap, 2012) This user understands and embraces the online game for what it is and does for her as an individual within the community. It is a form of ‘identity workshop’ (Bruckman, 1992) the user enjoys the freedom the ‘game’ offers, not wanting it to push into offline life.  Turkle (2006, p7) confirms ‘It is too limiting to think that people are tethered to their devices. People are tethered to the gratifications offered by their online selves’.  In the online world of Second Life, the identity created is often in direct response to the identity one holds offline.

The process of finding ones identity comes to the fore during adolescence.  Young people, who often feel constrained by social barriers in regards to sexuality offline, may find these barriers removed online, enhancing the possibility of finding a community that is likeminded and able to offer support for their developing identity.
There are many empowering factors for online relationships, such as the apparent anonymity, an absence of traditional offline indicators (i.e. appearances), an ease of finding others with specialised interests and finally a greater control over interactions and presentation of ones self. (Amichai-Hamburger, & McKenna, 2006). Online, freed from traditional constraints of space and time, an individual is able to take make use of these online embedded factors. This adds another dimension for youth to negotiate during the particularly fragile time of identity building. Finding a supportive online community within which young people feel safe to share their ‘coming out’ story gives a sense of ‘authenticity’ to discovering sexuality, more so than watching gay characters on a television show. (Gray, 2009)  As new media scholar Nancy Baym argues “online spaces are constructed and the activities that people do online are intimately interwoven with the construction of the offline world…whether we are using the Internet or not” (Baym, 2006, p. 86). The ‘self’ no longer exists either online or offline, through attachment to devices it ‘now occupies the liminal space between the physical and its life on the screen’. (Turkle, 2006, p.2). Today’s tethered teens are able to access many communities that enable not only a less stressful, and more normalised experience during a vulnerable time but give them the opportunity to connect to themself. (Turkle, 2006). The Internet has provided a space for sexual minorities to identify and reveal their sexual orientation, or interests before doing so offline. Bamm, et al. (2009) describe how this can be a “relatively safe environment to share feelings about one’s sexual orientation.

The apparent authenticity online is not limited to young peoples identity work.  The job of identity forming never ends, we simply use the tools available to us at each stage of our lives. (Turkle, 2006) Individuals are looking to the Internet to find a place, a community, that they share faith with more than ever before. Slater (2002) observes "…past media have also seemed to constitute new forms and spaces of sociality, even virtuality's, they have quickly been absorbed into every day practices as utilities …" (cited McLuhan 1974,Standage 1999 by Slater, 2002), just as finding your sexual self online is no longer an unusual avenue, neither is the everyday activity of practicing ones faith. Evangelists have been using the broadcast medium of television for decades however television because of its ‘one to many’ communication, it does not hold the collaborative appeal of an online environment.

Many of the newer ‘megachurches’, a church with a weekly attendance of 2,000 or more, purposefully create an image enticing to a younger congregation, a congregation seeking religion actively as opposed to more traditional faith holders. Von der Ruhr & Daniels (2012, p. 358) explain, ‘Seeker-oriented mega churches typically target religious refugees, or seekers, in order to grow’. By removing external visual cues of any particular faith, by removing the ‘space’, for example crosses, stained glass windows, kneeling and traditional hymns the new mega churches are packaging religion in a truly palatable way for almost anybody. ‘Hillsong exemplifies the globalisation of religion, while simultaneously stressing local ties, with contemporary media technology in a traditional theological and modern social context’ (Connell, 2006, p. 315) Australia’s mega church Hillsong strongly ustilises the web to send a message of it’s own ‘mega-ness’. An individual is able to employ computer mediated communication (CMC) to understand the religious product on offer well before stepping physical foot inside the church, taking McLuhan’s (1965) comment ‘the medium is the message’ to a new level. Faith, being part of the ‘devices’ that tether us, through our laptops and our smart phones is constant part of the ‘always on-always on us’ self (Turkle, 2006). Where once attending mass once a week was the required engagement, there is now a myriad of online meetings, conferences, donations of money and time to be accessed constantly.


Throughout the history of our species, humans have sought to "conquer time and space through speech, art and architecture, through writing and printing, and through various forms of transportation." Innis, 1951, p. 161. The vehicle of transportation is now the Internet. Humanity is moving toward living ‘liminally’ neither completely engaged in the physical offline or the virtual online. Without the constraint of a physical body the virtual self is enabled to move through the online space, however our concept of space and time has shifted. From the advent of the mechanical clock, time has been effectively separated from space, time becoming like modern space ‘which is empty and the same everywhere’. (Giddens, 1990, p.17-18 in Hongladaram, 2002) This concept of modern space speaks to the new ‘megachurches’ lack of religious cues and the self-build identity available on Second Life. The opportunities presented to engage with communities online are endless and there is a diversity of community available well beyond the local. The ‘self’ is freed online to access and engage with virtual communities allowing social relations to form without the constraint of our bodies, time and space.




Reference List.

Amichai-Hamburger, Y. & McKenna, K. Y. A. (2006). The contact hypothesis reconsidered: Interacting via the Internet. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(3), 825-843.

Baams, L., Jonas, K.J., Utz, S. & Vuurs, L. (2011). Internet use and online social support among same sex attracted individuals of different ages. Computers in Human Behaviour, 27(5), 1820–1827.

Bruckman, A. (1992) Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality. Unpublished paper. Media Lab, MIT. Retrieved 9 August 2012 http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/old-papers.html#IW

Changsoo, K., Sang-Gun, L. & Minchoel, K. (2012). I became an attractive person in the virtual world: Users’ identification with virtual communities and avatars. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(5), 1663-1669.

Connell, J. (2005) Hillsong: A Megachurch in the Sydney Suburb, Australian Geographer, 36(3), 315-332.

Dixon, K. (2009). The Global Village Revisited: Art, politics and television, Lexington Books: Plymouth, UK.

Gray, M. L. (2009), Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14: 1162–1189

Hongladarom, S. (2002), 'The Web of Time and the Dilemma of Globalization', The Information Society, 18(4), 241 – 249.

Innis, H. A. (1951), The Bias of Communication, University of Toronto Press: Canada.

Meh…Its just a video game. amiright? Second Life need to own what it is – a game. (2012) Retrieved August 5, 2012, from http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/category/second-life/community/Meh… Its just a video game. amiright? Second Life need to own what it is – a game

Ruhr von der, M. & Daniels, J. (2012). Examining megachurch growth: free riding, fit, and faith", International Journal of Social Economics, 39(5), 357 – 372.

Shafi,. (2005), "Can a Virtual Community be any different from the experience of a Real Community?" Incoherent Thoughts, Retrieved 7 August 2012, from Curtin University of Technology Library E-reserve.

Slater, D. (2002). Social Relationships and Identity Online and Offline. In Leah A. Lievrouw & Sonia M. Livingstone (Eds.), Handbook of New Media (pp. 533-546). Cited in paper: McLuhan, M (1974) Standage, T (1999) Retrieved 8 August 2012, from Curtin University of Technology Library E-Reserve

Turkle, S. (2006), Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self. Handbook of Mobile Communications and Social Change. Cambridge: MIT Press pp1-20

Net102 - Essay 1

My 1st essay in Net102. This is an unedited copy of a submitted and marked essay. Please do not copy the essay, it is plagiarism.

My focus was on Health, and how through the internet, pregnant women are empowered by the information they now have access to. I received a credit for this essay.

Throughout the course of their life women experience many health related changes from puberty to menopause and potentially pregnancy. This essay will analyse how women accessing Internet sites providing information on pregnancy has the potential to alter the way in which women experience and understand pregnancy. It will argue that pregnancy experiences change for women when they are able to access online material directed towards expectant mothers that are diverse and that enable women to gather up and redefine their pregnancy experiences in empowering ways. Women are at the forefront of information gathering online, research showing that women are more likely than men to search for health-related information (Sarkadi & Bremberg, 2005). Haythornthwaite (2002) explains that the Internet has indeed been routinely incorporated into almost every aspect of business, educational and leisure activities. This incorporation of activities is one aspect of how everyday life is being experienced through the Internet-mediated activities of information and communication. 

Pregnancy is part of everyday life. As a mother and/or parent the period of pregnancy is spent furnishing for a life role not currently inhabited. The nine months of gestation is a time of creating a new 'habitus' (Fiske, 2002) as a parent, a mother. Through communicating and collaborating in online communities, one is able to create an online identity of a pregnant women, through 'the weaving of one's own richly textured life within the constraints of economic depravation and oppression’ (Fiske, 2002, p160). Thus reaching out to other women who are also using the Internet to begin ‘constructing, and therefore exerting some control over, social identities and social relations' (Fiske, 2002, p160). To an extent, a mother to be, regardless of economic status, creates an idea, creates the outlines of the life they want for their child, and that they want to lead as a parent. They are using the online tools available to them to extend control their pregnancy and collaborating with other women who are undergoing the same changes to their everyday lives.

Online communities are a source of collaborative reassurance for many pregnant women. They enable women to communicate across physical boundaries, time zones and cultural differences. Through online communities, many women form online mothers groups with whom they continue to communicate with beyond the end of their pregnancy. (Ley, 2003) Online social networks and communities also have the potential to disempower women through the creation of unnecessary stress. Women experience their pregnancies differently and have a myriad of conditions and histories that contribute to the way they experience pregnancy. In this instance, not all information shared is information that empowers. Being able to communicate with other women online does allow the opportunity to engage in relatively anonymous discourse with other women experiencing pregnancy at the same time. This discourse enables ritualization of particular milestones throughout pregnancy, such as discovering the sex of the child and discussing symptoms. (Wu Song et al, 2012) 

The Internet and its applications hold the collective intelligence of all who use them. It is this information online that many women search to access while pregnant. Through the collective knowledge of many, women are embracing the empowerment of gathering information about the changes occurring within them during pregnancy. Collective intelligence may be powerful, persuasive and formed through global collaboration; however, this is information is not individualized. Eyesenbach (2008, p3) states ‘the health professional is an expert in identifying disease, while the patient is an expert in experiencing it’ (Davidson & Pennebaker, 1997). Recognising that the consumer of healthcare is the expert in experiencing their condition empowers one to take control of their health, however, limiting professional contact in exchange for online access to unendorsed information has the potential to negatively affect a woman’s pregnancy journey. Pregnant women are discovering information online that they perceive to be reliable but are not always choosing to discuss these findings with a health professional during scheduled antenatal appointments (Larsson, 2007). The information gap between face-to-face discussions and that gained from online searches needs to be minimized, limiting the amount of irrelevant and potentially harmful information pregnant women believe. Patients want their health professionals to provide them with guidance on useful Internet sites regarding their specific health problems (Salo et al., 2003), ensuring that collaborative discussions form part of each visit with a medical professional will assist women in making empowered decisions throughout their pregnancy.

Due to work outside of the home commitments and living far from family members, women who are pregnant have less time and fewer opportunities to receive support from offline friends and family (Ley, 2007). These changes from local family based communities to global online communities help fill the void for emotional support. It is the process of validation within a like-minded community that is a major source of this support (Lowe et al, 2009). Online-communities also help to share the anecdotal information that is traditionally passed between women during the time of pregnancy. This anecdotal information is often not medically endorsed, however, being involved in familial discourse may help a pregnant women self monitor her pregnancy and provide a feeling of reassurance and empowerment in decision making throughout her pregnancy. The opportunity to collaborate online with a midwife or other endorsed medical professional would add an endorsed layer to the advantages of online intelligence. 

Nettleton, Burrows & O’Malley (2005) have shown that consumer use of the Internet supports the idea of media convergence, in which traditional trusted information givers (in this case official health information sites) are highly valued online. In part, due to this, the Internet has become a valuable source of information and support for pregnant women as they navigate the changes in their everyday lives. Decision-making processes for women are enhanced when they are able to access online material directed towards expectant mothers that are diverse, enabling them to redefine their pregnancy experience in empowering ways. The information that is retrieved online ‘should then be discussed during antenatal care visits to ensure that new knowledge generates understanding, empowerment and a sound preparation for childbirth and parenthood’ (Larsson, 2005, p19). The support of online communities is invaluable, particularly for those without an offline support group in close physical proximity. Through the Internet-mediated activities of information and communication pregnant women are empowered to access the Internet for information and support throughout their pregnancy.

Reference List

Eyesenbach, G. (2008). Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 10(3) e22. doi:10.2196/jmir.1030

Fiske, J. (1992). Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson & P. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural Studies ,154-173, New York: Routtledge.

Haythornthwaite, C (2002) The Internet in Everyday Life. American Behavioral Scientist, 45(3), 363-382 

Larsson, M (2005) A descriptive study of the use of the Internet by women seeking pregnancy-related information, Midwifery, 25(1), 14-20

Ley, B. L. (2007), Vive Les Roses!: The Architecture of Commitment in an Online Pregnancy and Mothering Group. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, (12), 1388–1408. 

Lowe, P, Powell, J, Griffiths, F, Thorogood, M & Locock, L (2009) Making it all normal: the role of the internet in problematic pregnancy, Qualitative health research, 19(10), 1476-84.

Nettleton, S., Burrows, R. & O'Malley, L. (2005), The mundane realities of the everyday lay use of the internet for health, and their consequences for media convergence. Sociology of Health & Illness, (27), 972–992.

Salo, D., Perez, C., Lavery, R., et al., 2003. Patient education and the Internet: do patients want us to provide them with medical web sites to learn more about their medical problems? The Journal of Emergency Medicine 26 (3), 293–300.

Sarkadi, A., Bremberg, S., 2005. Socially unbiased parenting support on the Internet: a cross-sectional study of users of a large Swedish parenting website. Child: Care, Health & Development, 31(1), 43–52.  

Wu Song, F, Ellis West, J, Lundy, L & Dahmen, N., (2012) Women, Pregnancy, and Health Information Online: The Making of Informed Patients and Ideal Mothers. Gender & Society doi:10.1177/0891243212446336