Culture and Society - Relationships online

There are many advantages to forming relationships online. It is very easy to find people online that have the same interests as you. If you go to an online form you can get chatting to people about something you have in common. You don't have to waste any time getting to know someone to then realise you have nothing in common, here you know straight away that you have shared interests. It's becoming increasingly popular for people to use online dating websites and on these everyone generally has the same intensions. They want to form a relationship online with the intension of meeting up and possibly having an offline or sexual relationship. 

Having never used a dating website I can only make assumptions about what happens on them. But what I think is that people would be very open with each other and it would be easy to find someone in a similar situation to you, e.g. two people going through a divorce. There isn't the same messing around as there would be if you went to try and meet someone at a bar. Not everyone in bars are looking to meet someone, a lot of people there would already be in a relationship or be married. This makes it harder to approach people when you don't know their situation. With online dating you know that everyone is there to try and meet someone. You can also hide behind your computer, this may feel like security for some people. If you were to meet someone in public you'd have to really put yourself out there. Also chatting online avoids any awkward silences. You have a few minutes to think about what you want to say next and this is also a way of avoiding saying something you may regret. 

Having an online relationship is also very convenient. You can sit at home by the fire with the TV on, in your pj's and chat to someone. All you'd have to do maybe is to upload a photo of yourself from one time that you may have been dressed up with makeup on. If you were to go out to a pub to try and meet someone you would constantly have to get dressed up, perfect hair, perfect makeup to try to look attractive to the opposite sex. With online dating you can also form a relationship without it being based on what you look like. You can get to know someone based on their personality and when your ready send them a photo of yourself. Then you can arrange to meet up with the other person once you've really got to know who they are and feel comfortable around them. I think that people also spend hours online chatting to someone they have just met for the first time. This would help the relationship excel very quickly. Whereas if you were meeting someone for a first date you would spend maybe two to three hours together at a time and it would take a few dates before you really get to know them. Online you can get to know everything about a person in the one evening over a space of a few hours and then you can decide if you want to continue this relationship with them or move on.

There is also some disadvantages to forming a relationship online. It is a lot easier to deceive someone online then it is in person. I don't think it's a lot more natural for it to happen now online but it certainly gives people that extra platform to deceive. People have been deceiving each other for years before the internet arrived. Many people have been found to live double lives before the internet. I think that now that you can form relationships online it is easier to deceive but it's also easier to be found out. An example of this I will take from the film Catfish. The relationship in this documentary was mostly online so when the girl sent the man a song she said she recorded of herself singing he was able to find the exact same recording on youtube and subsequently finding out that the whole relationship was a scam. 

People can easily get sucked into the lies and scams of who they meet online, who they think they can really trust and develop genuine feelings for. But I would just say to have your wits about you and be weary of people. It's ok to question things and if they are genuine they shouldn't have a problem with this and they should understand your need to question. Sometimes if someone is too good to be true they generally are so you just need to be careful. I have had one extended family member to meet someone online and three years later they are still together and very happy. They were both there for each other when they needed someone and helped each other through a very difficult time and came out the other side very happy. The problem is you only ever hear of the bad stories and the scams reported in the media, you don't hear about the 'happily ever afters'. I believe that there is more good then bad in online relationships.

Culture and Society - offline/online communities

This week I have considered my engagement with different communities. When I was younger I definitely felt more like part of the community I live in then I do now. When you're young and in school it's very easy to be part of the community you live in. You go to school everyday, you go to the local shop everyday after school, you go to youth club, you go to football/camogie training. All of this involves being part of the local community and engaging with all the people in the community. I live in a very small village so in primary school everyone hangs round with each other and everyone knew each other other. All of the school and after school activities involved the same people. But since going to secondary school I got further and further away from the community I live in. Instead of hanging out in the village every day I was at school in town and hanging round town after school and making new friends. I never really felt like part of a community during this time. Maybe it was a community in itself but it was nothing like the sense of community that I was used to.

Now, even though I've lived in the same place my whole life I don't feel like part of the community I live in. There has been so many new houses built in my area in the last few years that I don't know a lot of people that live there now that I maybe would know if I was only growing up now. I also never see a lot of the people that I used to see everyday because we hang out in completely different circles now. I still hang around with two friends that live beside me but most of my friends are in town.

When I say 'hang around' even that meaning is different then it used to be years ago. Now I hang around with my friends in each other houses every evening. Years ago we were hanging around sitting on a wall, freezing, down the road. I used to tell my mam 'I'm going down the road.' She would never really know where I was but now its more specific when I say I'm going to a certain friends house. But before we would pick a specific point, ie. the wall, and a specific time to meet and everyone would be there at the exact time and place. Now when I'm meeting someone its like 'I'll ring you when I'm leaving to see where you are.'

In terms of hanging around online I think teenagers see this as very important. They are afraid to be offline incase they miss something. I think the idea of missing out is a big thing for teenagers. I know when I was younger I always wanted to do the things and go places everyone else was going incase I missed something but as you get older you definitely grow out of this and realise that maybe other things are more important. But for teenagers I think that hanging around online is the equivalent of this nowadays. In a way it does make more sense to hang around online waiting for your friends to come so you can talk or play games with them rather then hanging round on the street hoping that one of your friends might come along. There's also definitely a benefit to engaging online in a warm house on a comfy seat rather then outside on a freezing cold wall. It also means to don't have to get dressed or put on makeup, you can look a mess while talking to people without having to care.

Culture and Society - Fan culture and remix

Fandom has really become huge since the development of the internet and social networking sites. Here you can find people who are fans of absolutely anything. If you're into something that none of your friends like you can easily find hundreds or thousands of people online that have the same interests as you.
Before online fan communities if someone was interested in something it generally would have died out after awhile if you were the only person interested in it, but now with online fandom you can keep it going for a very long time because there will always be other people online who are into the same things as you.

For me it was David Beckham that I was a huge fan of when I was younger. I had everything that was ever release with him on it. In my bedroom I had what I called my David Beckham wall of fame that was just covered in photos and posters of him. I cut out every single picture of him in every paper and bought every magazine he was in. I even have a David Beckham mug that I still use to this day. My friends would buy me posters of him for my birthday and I had a Man utd jersey with his name and number on the back. I truly was obsessed with him, but after a while my obsession died down. I still love him but not to the extent that I used to. I was the only one of my friends who liked him so much so after a while I really had nothing to keep me going with my fandom. This was all before I knew about the internet and online fan communities and I think if they had of been around then I would have kept it up a lot longer. If I could have gone online and shared all the stuff I had collected on him I think I would have kept doing it. Maybe this picture will help you understand my obsession a bit more..

I think fan culture has definitely contributed to remix culture. That's one of the ways in which fans engage with the objects of their affection. They take music or videos of people they love and put it all together in their own creative way. I wouldn't call it distorting the original, I think these people are very creative and I admire they're ability to do remixes and I think it's great that they are so passionate about something they love. So part of the fan culture is making these remixes and putting them online for people to see and comment on and then to also share what they have done. A great way for people to engage with fandom is twitter. On twitter people can actually engage with celebrities and tweet them in hope of getting a tweet back and a lot of the time they do so this reinforces the fandom. People even name themselves on twitter after the people they admire or use the same surname as them. Facebook pages are also great for famous people to keep their fans up to date by posting photos and events. This way fans can go see them at an event or signing they might be at. One good example of fandom is when the boy band One Direction were filming their latest music video they posted it on twitter that they were going out in London and loads of fan showed up and ended up getting in their music video. I think these outlets on the internet also allow celebrities let their fans know that they really appreciate them so this also reinforces fan culture.