In this weeks class we spent a while discussing our blogs and how everybody was getting along with them. John offered some feedback for the blogs and gave us some tips on what we should be concentrating on within the blogs, which was really helpful.
During the second half of the class we had an interesting discussion about online privacy and how much we think it affects us in our lives right now. John asked us if we ever made any agreements with our friends on what was or wasn't to be posted on social media, especially before any kind of event or night out. He seemed surprised when most of us said that it wasn't really something we made a point of saying to our friends or family when at an event. I put across that I would trust my friends not to post something embarrassing or inappropriate of me publicly, and that there's a sort of mutual, unspoken agreement among us that that's the done thing. I am aware though that you can't always trust somebody to stand by that, especially when it's an unspoken thing that you haven't made explicitly clear.
I did like the idea of the social media website 'Path' that John brought up, and was surprised that it wasn't more well known. I then thought, perhaps because people are used to sharing photos on private chats in apps such as Snapchat and Facebook Messenger, there would be no need really to make a totally separate, new social media account just to do essentially the same thing. For example, my extended family on my dad's side of the family (grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins etc.) have a family Whatsapp group in which everyone chats and shares photos from recent events. These chats are totally exclusive to whoever is included in the group and therefore protect anything private that people wouldn't want anyone from outside the group seeing.
As for our group project, we finally made some progress and managed to all meet up in person to discuss how to go ahead with the project. It was interesting to see everyone as a group in person as opposed to in SL, and conversation was much easier this way. It seemed some of our group members were still confused as to what was required of the brief so we spent a good chunk of time trying to get our heads around it all. We managed to set everyone some duties and tried to organise another time that would suit everyone to meet up again while we were all together. A small step in the right direction at least!
Until next time!
