Reading responses - cybersociality

Professor Song's excerpt about the online community CareCure showed how an online can help those who are (or who have loved ones that are) afflicted with paralysis. This online forum fills in as a gathering place for those unable to gather, whether out of inconvenience or because they simply can't walk, sort of like the virtual church we saw in second life. Additionally, as we read in an earlier piece, the forum becomes a virtual space for sharing and communicating, restricted less by literal space and time, but influenced by the features of the website itself, such as more recent posts being shown at the top, which impacts how users will perceive and interact with others. Putting the most recent posts first may seem like a no-brainer but other major websites such as Reddit actually use an alternative system of having the most highly upvoted posts first, which shapes community interaction in a very different way.

Banner's article analyzes the relationship between virtual worlds and biosociality, by examining an online community of patients suffering from (or at least, self-identifying with) specific diseases: chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. The community resides at the website PatiensLikeMe.com, which, as the name implies, allows patients to connect with others like themselves. The discussion boards and forums set up for patients of fairly specific illnesses lead to the formation of a specialized social network to provide support, as well as a shift in the social construct aspect of the disease. Banner calls this process "bioremediation", and by linking these patients together on the basis of their shared illness, in a way, they begin to experience the ups and downs of their sickness together. What I thought to be most notable was that Banner also points out that while PatientsLikeMe certainly serves as an effective form of a support group for personal needs, the purpose of this online community of patients is for the betterment of medical research. In this way, each user is not just offering support but also becoming a contributor to biomedical research.

To me, Gershon's article was the most captivating, most likely because, as someone who isn't suffering from a major disease or a frequenter of forums for specific interests and communities, I could relate to it the most. As someone who primarily uses one email address at a time for communication (and only switching when an acquaintance may not be familiar with that one but may know another email of mine) I certainly hadn't considered the implications of things such as work, personal, and joint email accounts. While I agree that online communication can be hampered by media ideologies (the different paradigms each individual may have regarding different communication platforms) I have to agree with pseudonym Duae Vultae that text based communication has its advantages in allowing messages to be sent unadulterated by emotional influence. However, with that gone, one must be sure to text carefully, making good use of word choice, punctuation, and sentence structure to get the precise message across and instill as much meaning into the words as possible (meaning that would otherwise be implied IRL)