Internet Communities

For this assignment, I chose to join a private Yahoo group for moms of large families.  With nine children, I more than qualify!  Most people consider three or four children to be a "large" family, mostly because parents are outnumbered when there are three children in the family.  Also, many people consider two children to be the "ideal" number of children, so anything more than two children is considered to be "large."  This group defines "large family" as one with three or more children.

Assimilating into this group was easy, since there are many things I have in common with other moms with large families.  Children are expensive, and we all shared ideas for dealing with the current economic mess without hurting our families.  My children range in age from 21 years down to 1 year, so I have children at all stages of development, and I was able to participate in discussions regarding children of different ages.  One of my children (Matthew, age 4) has special needs (developmental delays similar to autism), so I could give advice to the moms concerned about their children's development, as well as those interested in seeking help from their local school districts.  I learned a lot from the moms with teenage girls, since my oldest daughter is only eight years old.

I think that I have been accepted into the group, mostly because my posts are not ignored, and everyone seems friendly to me through the posts to the group.  I have no reason to suspect that there are any hostilities being expressed "off group" concerning me, and I feel comfortable sharing things with this group.  Of course, with any internet communication, true feelings are not always easy to discern, since I can't read the body language of the other participants, and I certainly can't hear their voices to detect any sarcasm or strained voices that might give me clues about their feelings.  All in all, this group seems very positive.  Most of us have a pretty strong sense of humor, which seems to be a requirement for surviving when you are outnumbered by children.  Disagreements, which have been few during the month I've been involved with this group, are usually expressed in terms of "let's agree to disagree."  Of course, some hot-button issues, such as abortion, politics, and religion, are not discussed within the group.  We try to be supportive of each other as much as possible, and we share laughs over the questions we get when people learn of our family size.  We also offer virtual shoulders to cry on when members of the group have family problems that cause them stress or pain.

According to Wood and Smith, several factors come into play when a virtual community is formed.  Basically, the group members need to have the computer skills necessary to find and join the group in the first place, then they need to have the time to contribute to sharing with the group.  In addition, group members must have something in common (in my case, the experience of raising a large family), and they need to be willing to participate in the give-and-take of the group.  Other groups I've belonged to allow "lurkers," people who join the group but only participate when necessary.  For instance, I belong to a group of Gammill longarm quilting machine owners, but I don't post on that group unless I have a problem with my machine or have insights to share with someone who is having a problem with his/her machine.  Most of the time, I "lurk" on that group, reading the posts but not truly participating in the group.  The large family group I joined does not allow lurkers; you are required to participate in the discussions to remain in the group, and the moderator will disable your membership for lack of participation.  The more you participate in a group, I believe, the harder it is to hide your true self and keep your lies straight.

Society at large generally benefits from these virtual communities, in my opinion.  I know very few women who have as many children as I do, and most of them have as little time to visit in person as I do.  Let's just say that I don't get out much!  Being able to find a group of women in my situation online is very comforting.  Most of my real life friends don't understand how difficult it can be to raise so many children, and some of them are disdainful of my decision to have such a large family.  If I were to complain to those friends about problems I'm having with my children, their reaction would be to ask me why I chose to have so many children in the first place.  They would act like I can't handle my children, or that I had too many, etc.  My online friends have many children and understand why I had them, so they are free to be supportive of the normal ups and downs that all parents experience.

I will say that online communities can be bad, too.  I strongly believe that pedophiles have greatly increased in number once they discovered others with their obsessions.  The internet allowed them to share ideas for "grooming" children, and it seems to have become a game for these men to create videos and pictures more graphic than the others in their group.  One very vocal pedophile even created websites listing places where little girls could be found, encouraging pedophiles to go to public events and take pictures of the children there.  I think that the existence of such groups and websites has made our world a lot more dangerous to children everywhere.

In summary, I enjoyed finding a group of like-minded moms who understand why I have so many children.  It's nice to not be asked the usual questions ("Are you Catholic?"  "Are you Mormon?"  "Are you crazy?"  "Do you know what causes that?"  "Have you heard of birth control?").  It's also nice to be able to share my frustrations with women who won't accuse me of having more children than I can handle, especially since I am usually perfectly capable of being a good mom to my brood.  Nobody is perfect, and we're all human, and nobody likes to be criticized all of the time.  It's always nice to find new friends, too.  :)

Letters

For this assignment, I chose to write to my best friend from high school, Sheila, and my oldest son, Alexander ("Lex," as he prefers to be called now).  I am mailing a hand-written letter to Sheila, since that was our primary means of communication when we were in school.  Lex will get an e-mail, since that is our primary method of communication now.

In my letter to Sheila, I told her how much her friendship meant to me when I was new in town and didn't fit in with anyone at our small high school.  She and I shared most of our classes, since we were both trying to get into college, and our school only offered a few college preparatory classes each year.  We passed notes to each other all of the time, and we had a lot of fun together.  We still talk on the phone occasionally, and she always teases me about birth control (she only had two children, compared to my nine).  I'm not sure if she'll have time to respond, since she has a very busy life, but I hope she will at least let me know when she receives her letter.

In my e-mail to Alexander, I told him how getting pregnant with him completely altered my life.  I shared some of my favorite memories of his childhood, as well as how much I miss being around him.  I also told him how proud I am of his accomplishments, and that I am hoping that his law school application gets accepted next year.  I think he will do very well in his life, as long as he doesn't make me a grandmother any time soon!

I didn't hear back from Sheila, but then again, I didn't expect to.  She rarely e-mails me, and she only sends out a letter once a year (usually at Christmas).  Lex and I sent text messages back and forth after he read his e-mailed letter.  He was touched that I took the time to write all of that for him.

Both letters were approximately the same length.  I can type much faster than I can do cursive, but I felt that both recipients deserved a heartfelt letter.  I did spend much more time with Sheila's letter, primarily because I was writing in pen, and I didn't want to have to scratch through all of my mistakes or rewrite the letter every time I changed my mind about what to say.

In both letters, I felt that I had to be careful about what I wrote, in order to avoid miscommunication.  In Wood & Smith, the Social Context Clues Theory takes place whenever human communication occurs.  We are usually aware of the audience and environment when we communicate, and I took both of those into consideration when writing my letters.  My tone was different in each letter, too, simply because Sheila is someone my age and is my equal, while Alexander is much younger and is my child.  However, both letters were proofread before sending, primarily to ensure that nothing I didn't mean to say came through.

This was an enjoyable assignment.  I hope I'll hear from Sheila soon.  Maybe she'll write back to me with a "real" letter!  :)

MySpace, My Identity

I have a MySpace page (MySpace/OregonMathGeek).  I created it in response to the pestering of my older sons, who wanted a way to interact with me before they received cell phones with text messaging capability.  It also allows me to read their private blog posts, with their permission, of course.  They tend to write more than they talk to me on the phone, so I gain a tremendous amount of insight into their lives by reading their MySpace pages.

I've always been a fairly open person, and I see no point in hiding my true persona behind a pretend one online.  After all, who wants to be friends with someone without flaws?  Having a perfect friend would put all sorts of pressure on me to be perfect, and being perfect is just not in my nature.  However, I see no point in exposing everything about myself online.  

I do reveal a little about myself in my choice of user name.  I grew up in Oregon, but I've only lived there one year out of the last 22, due to being married to two military husbands (not at the same time) and being military myself.  There aren't any active duty bases in Oregon, and the only reason I went home for a year was because my ex-husband spent a year in Korea without me.  Anyway, I'm incredibly homesick, so I used Oregon as part of my user name.  I've been a technology geek since middle school, when I first discovered the existence of computers (around 1979--yes, I'm that old).  Finally, before my second husband got transferred to Louisiana, I was a mathematics major at the University of Oklahoma.  Put all of those aspects of me together, and you get OregonMathGeek.  Original, yet generic.  :)

My MySpace page has one picture of me on it, and in it, I'm holding one of my babies.  That reveals a little about me, too, because being a mom has consumed over half of my life so far.  My children are extremely important to me, and I almost never get photographed without at least one of them with me.  I don't have a stunningly beautiful face that people will remember long after leaving my website, so my identity is still fairly safe.

I think today's society seems very transparent on the surface.  Websites like MySpace and FaceBook allow people to express themselves online in any way that they want to.  If I had the time and desire to do so, I could create an elaborate website that would highlight all of my favorite interests.  If I did that, I'd probably attract other people who share those interests, thus giving me more people to chat with and share stories with.  That would be a lot of fun, but would it be worth it?  I don't know.  I do have a life outside of the internet, and I think that finding even more friends online would take more time away from the things I really want to do in real life.  For instance, spending an hour a day chatting online with other cyclists would keep me from getting my share of the housework done, thus keeping me from being able to ride my bicycle when my husband gets home from work.  What's the point of sharing with other cyclists if I having nothing new to share?  

According to Wood & Smith, people tend to form pseudonyms to describe themselves online.  Nicknames, such as OregonMathGeek, are a quick way of identifying ourselves in the online world without revealing our real names.  They also serve to compartmentalize our online interactions as separate from our face-to-face ones.  This allows us to adopt different identities in different online situations.  For instance, you know my MySpace identity, but what about the one I use for my quilting groups?  Or the five or six other nicknames I've created to fit into different forums all over the internet?  The point is that we can't truly describe ourselves online with only one pseudonym, since we are complex human beings with a vast array of interests and motivations.

This is OregonMathGeek, signing off.  :)

You've Got Mail!

I heard that sentence so many times when I was younger.  AOL was the first online service I ever used, and I spent a lot of time changing my "You've got mail!" voice to something different (usually Star Trek related).  Anyway, I obviously chose option one for this assignment.  I saw this movie years ago, and it was fun watching it again.  It's obvious that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have a lot of chemistry and affection for each other, and it's always so much fun to watch them together on screen.

In You've Got Mail, Joe and Kathleen became friends through the internet.  Both were already in relationships, and both had their own lives.  I'm not sure that they actually recreated their identities online.  I think they were just more careful about what they said than they would have been normally.  At the very basic level, both Joe and Kathleen expressed their feelings honestly and openly online.  However, the drama came in when they met in person, not knowing who they were actually meeting.  Unfortunately, Joe was less than forthcoming when he met Kathleen the first time (not telling her his last name), which caused Kathleen to feel angry and embarrassed for criticizing Joe's bookstore to Joe himself.  Kathleen also saw Joe as a threat to her beloved bookstore, once she learned who he was.  They ended up arguing and slinging insults at each other.  When Joe discovered that Kathleen was the woman he had been corresponding with online, it really shook up his perception of her real life persona.  All of a sudden, he had to reconcile his distaste for Kathleen in real life with his knowledge of her true personality, which he found very attractive.  It took him a while to figure out whether or not he wanted to get involved with her outside of the online world, and once he made the effort to get to know her in real life (and let her get to know him better, to help her see past her anger and hurt feelings), things improved for both of them.  They eventually ended up together, supposedly living happily ever after.

The premise of the movie was that you should be prepared for the possibility of meeting a person in real life who is important to you online.  I do think it would be harder for this to happen now than it would have been in 1998, when the movie came out.  In 1998, digital cameras were not commonly used, and people did not routinely place their pictures online for everyone to see.  That has definitely changed, so most people meeting online should know what the other person looks like from the beginning.

A little thing that I caught when watching this movie was how the character's computer choices tied in with the story line.  Joe was using an IBM Thinkpad, a common business computer at the time.  Kathleen was using an Apple Macintosh laptop, which were far less common in 1998 than they are now.  It emphasized the differences between them--the big business (IBM) and the underdog (Apple).  

This movie does tie in with our Wood & Smith readings this week, which cover the history of the internet.  You can see the fairly primitive AOL interface, and you can hear the sounds of the modem connecting through the phone lines.  For the younger generation, dial-up internet is probably incredibly quaint and outdated, but at the time, that's all we had.  

As far as society is concerned, this movie goes back to last week's discussion about how computer-mediated communication leads to discomfort when people meet in real life after forming a relationship online.  How can you reconcile your online persona with your normal personality?  How can you get used to someone else's little personality quirks when you actually meet?  What do you do if you become very interested in someone online who turns out to be physically unattractive in real life?  All of these questions are related to the fact that the people you meet online are only showing their best sides, just as you are minimizing your own flaws when you chat online.  It will be interesting, as we navigate through this societal change, to see how we as a society will deal with the profound changes in our interpersonal communications.

Abstinence

As part of our first assignment, I abstained from internet use from 10 p.m. Tuesday, June 24, to 8 a.m. Thursday, June 26.

Normally, I spend a lot of time online.  I am purely a distance education student at OSU, so when classes are in session, I do a lot of my schoolwork online.  Even without school, I am online a lot, visiting my favorite message boards, reading my favorite websites and blogs, updating my personal blog, tinkering with my business website, and shopping online.  The internet is my connection to the outside world.

For a little background, I am the mother of nine children.  Four of them, my sons from my first marriage (ages 21, 19, 16, and 13), are currently living with/near their dad (my ex-husband) in the Seattle area.  In addition to phone calls and text messages, I check their MySpace pages on a regular basis, and they read my personal blog.  My younger five children (ages 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1) live with me and my second husband in Nebraska.  I am very restrictive about the internet when it comes to the little ones, and none of them are allowed to be online without me, my husband, or a teacher supervising them.  In addition to being a mom, I own a machine quilting business, with my company website as my primary method of contact for future customers.  I am also in the middle of coordinating a team of bicyclists who will be doing the RAGBRAI (Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) next month, while I will be taking my oldest daughter (age 8) to a national baton-twirling competition the same week.  Yes, I was supposed to be doing RAGBRAI, too, but I didn't learn the dates of the competition until after I volunteered to be the team lead.  Needless to say, I am a very busy person, and the internet is what I use to connect to everyone.

I will admit that I use the internet to "talk" to people partly because five young children are incapable of being quiet long enough for me to talk on the phone.  But that's another story.  :)

Fortunately for us, we were able to choose our 24-hour period of abstinence.  I chose mine to occur at a time when I knew things would be slow in my life.  I didn't want to miss anything important, such as business leads or important cycling updates.  Tuesday night, I sent a quick e-mail to my sons about my upcoming absence from the internet, and I added a short post to my personal blog (which is mostly read by my family and friends).  I read a book before going to bed that night.

First thing Wednesday morning, I reached for my laptop to check the day's weather, but I remembered my assignment and stopped.  Instead, I had my daughter check the Weather Channel, since she's very interested in meteorology, and she loves having any excuse to change to that channel.  Around that time, my baby walked in.  She's 13 months old and hasn't been feeling well lately.  I snuggled with her for a little while, then I helped everyone get dressed to take Rhiannon to her twirling lesson.  After she returned, I fed everyone lunch and continued to read my books.  My husband came home around 2 p.m., since he was very upset about his assignment to Tacoma, Washington, being cancelled by the Air Force.  Normally, I would have jumped on my computer to update my blog about that, but as the day went on, I found that I enjoyed not being online that day.  After driving to my Guard unit to sign some papers, I came home, fed the kids dinner, then went upstairs to quilt while the rest of the family watched one of the Indiana Jones movies.  Once the kids went to bed for the night, I continued quilting for a little while.  By then, my 24 hours were over, but I didn't feel like getting my laptop out of my backpack.  I just went to bed.

Thursday morning, I went back to my old habits.

What did I learn from this experience?  Well, I spend way too much time online.  I suspected that going into this assignment, but what surprised me was how little I missed it.  I stopped spending hours delving into my favorite message boards, and those same communities went on without me.  I didn't really miss much.  In my younger days, my mom and I used to watch soap operas.  We noticed that even if we went on vacation and didn't watch for weeks, it was incredibly easy to catch up on what we missed.  That's how I felt Thursday morning.  I really didn't miss much, but I gained a lot of time for other things in my life.  I was able to finish two difficult quilt blocks, in addition to spending time with my family and reading my textbooks.  I might not have been able to finish those blocks if I had been online all day, and they were due Thursday night (for a quilt club I belong to).

Now, as a small business owner, I was taking a risk by being offline even for a day.  I know from personal experience that a non-responsive business owner may lose business; I have e-mailed more than one business owner in the past, looking for information, and the one who wrote back to me fastest was usually the one who earned my business.  In today's world, customers expect almost instant gratification, and a few hours can mean the difference between a new customer and a lost contact.  Fortunately for me, nobody e-mailed me about my quilting services during my internet abstinence.

All in all, this has been a good experience for me.  I am looking forward to more mini-vacations from my internet addiction.

Welcome to my Communications Blog!

This blog has been created for Oregon State's Communication, Culture, and Cyberspace course.