Week 10: Networking

(An old internet meme titled 'How to be Emo')

This weeks reading, 'Rereading Fandom: Myspace Character Personas and Narrative Identification' deals largely with the emergence of 'new media' and the ways in which new media allows us to interact with existing media. For instance, the way which people create and moderate fake profiles of television show characters, the reading then looks at how this relates to previously established media-fan relationship theories.

The reading then discusses theories of Mayfield (2007) who insists that internet persona's create two types of identity, your real-world and simulated or your lived and written, the idea of this is that people will skew how they portray themselves online, Mayfield likens a myspace page to a teenagers bedroom wall where they can slap up images and videos.

However, this is all elementary human nature. If you look at any other circumstance that humans are given to express themselves, we always present what we want people to see. For instance, clothing we only dress the way we want people to perceive us, musical taste, home decor, formal work attire, we as humans understand that every one of these things is interpreted by other humans and vague judgements are made on those perceptions. The world has always worked like this and the advent of new facility's to personalise how we present ourselves (social media), is only going to strengthen our perceptions of difference and identity.