Iv'e missed you, where have you been all these years?

Kiaora all!


This is my first time embracing this community of talented University students with my unfocused and scattered piece of writing. I will try my best to make it as clear as possible. All feedback or disagreements will be welcomed with open arms:)

Today I was surfing the internet clicking my mouse around the usual websites that I gain addictive pleasure from, that being, Trademe and Myspace, when I stumbled across www.oldfriends.co.nz. Now I’m sure many of you are pondering why I am so late to discover this web sites existence since it has been around for ancient times and what not. Therefore, I state that it is due to the very essence of my lack of computer skills and restricted mobility in cyberspace.

Firstly, I became really fascinated in the main purpose of Oldfriends, that is, to reunite the many New Zealanders that have lost contact with class mates and work mates over the years. I guess this first initial physiological feeling of belonging and nostalgia for my past school years came over me. I started searching through people from my old kinder garden, primary school, intermediate, high school, and old work places ( haha New World, *cough*) discovering what all my friends were up to these days. It’s amazing how people change over the years and keeping that in mind, I was stoked on what amazing things I could tell people about my life today.

This brings me to my second point. In the lecture when we were discussing “virtual communities” and “virtual identities”, it dawned on me that this old friends website is quite complex in its nature in comparison to a popular ‘virtual community’ such as Myspace.

Oldfriends in similarity to Myspace presents the same notion of virtual communities in cyberspace. People on Myspace feel like they have a community of friends and interests. The use of extended networking adds a lot more emphasis to a larger virtual community that Myspace provides, that is the many different countries and music bands all over the world. Whilst a lot of people over the whole of Myspace know each other outside of cyberspace; the ‘real world’, a lot of the relationships in this online space lack the proximity of a personal relationship. More simply, I am arguing that if you met an American friend and joined in conversation for many years, you would still lack the closeness because of their ‘virtual identity’. Therefore, what I discovered about the nature of Oldfriends was that it took this concept of once knowing, seeing and talking to a person, and then created a new representation through a ‘virtual identity’. For example, my best friend from kindergarden, Samantha, was now living in England and practicing to be a surgeon. My memory of Samantha and I playing with the spaghetti play dough machine was now replaced with Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy.

In conclusion, I guess I am puzzled by the fact that ‘virtual communities’ and ‘virtual identities’ have such a huge impact on how we see and realize things. Every individual is existent in this world outside cyberspace and has the opportunity to be whatever they want in the ‘virtual world’ of the internet. It still ponders me to think that even though to yourself you are a physical person, you could still just be this virtual concept to someone else.

Anywho, I hope I wasn’t to confusing :)

Take care guys and have a mean ass weekend:)

Rachael :)