Newsletter for 5th Creative Cuppa Meet-up

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On the 31th March 2009, Creative Cuppa held its 5th meet-up in 526 KEB (Ken Edwards Building), City Campus, University of Leicester. Many thanks to Adeline Tan, Amit Chandraker, Chih-Jung Fan, Hwang Hs, Kal Jaber, Li Jun Zhang, Mokhtar Elareshi, Rosidayu Sabran, Walid Muhaisen, and Ivy Chen, for their participation. We would also like to express our special gratitude to Dr. Bu Qingxiu, from the School of Law, Queens University Belfast (QUB), for his attendance and thoughtful ideas. This time our discussion was focused on the topic of ‘virtual community/ online community’, as this is seen as an important aspect of the emerging Internet culture that is increasingly affecting and changing our real lives today.

Basically we addressed four key aspects of online communities. The discussion began with gender issues; actually the Internet and other new media technologies have provided more equal opportunities for women, as in the ‘weightless world’, physical weakness of women is no longer important; in this meaning, the historical boundaries between genders are broken. Therefore, Adeline believes that women can now do the same things as men, and think this is development of human society. However it still seems that women and men show great differences in their differing ‘virtual lives’. While most women are still more interested in chatting, gossip and female-oriented issues, men do still prefer to ‘do business’ of all kinds.

Then, our discussion was steered toward a focus on the virtual communities organized by special-interest groups, such as diaspora groups and protest groups. Actually people from these groups have also received great benefits from the Internet; now that it’s getting much easier for them to create their own connections or networks for their specific purposes. For instance, migrants can now easily create their own ‘migrant communities’ in their host country, in order to build invisible ties between each other and between them and their homelands. Activists, similarly, use the Internet to create temporary alliances in order to gather as many people as possible in a short space of time, in order to fight for political issues and rights.

After that, Hwang raised the very interesting point that young people seem more active in organizing or attending online communities, as they’re more curious about new things and more willing to share new things with each other. Hwang gave an example from South Korea, during the protest against the importation of US beef; young protesters used their camera-phones to capture the latest pictures from the protesting groups and sent them back to the camps for uploading to the web so that more people could be updated with live information. This also reminds us of another case: when the Sichuan Earthquake took place, it was young people again who shot live pictures and videos, and broadcast the calamity live online through Twitter and YouTube.

Once we’ve discussed all the matters, we then realized a question of whether there is a real separation between virtual communities and our ‘real world’. You can still see the connections everywhere; women are still chatty and sensitive; men are still ambitious and greedy; migrants are still interested in ‘ties’ with their ‘families’; and young people are still curious and active. That is to say, if there is no substantial change, our eulogizing about the ‘power of the Internet’ would be nothing but a hallucination. Dr. Bu pointed out that so far, no legal system in the world is complete to deal with the new emerging problems in cyberspace. In fact, he also admitted that most lawmakers have lagged far behind the rapid increase in new issues. If that is the case, we may question ourselves, whether we’re placed in a safer situation sitting behind the screen, or simply even more dangerous. If that is the case, women are getting more easily hooked; men more easily trapped; diasporas more easily controlled, and youngsters more easily deceived and used. And is that really what we expected from the Internet? This, we believe, is a big question that everyone should continue to think about carefully.

Generally, the meet-up this time was pretty successful, with our largest participation so far, since the event started in Nov. 2008. Even though we don't have to agree on everything, there we have a time when everybody all consider that we are experiencing the same things. Next time, we will be focused on the topic of ‘virtual reality/ digital avatar’; and we're going to be brought into a 3D space, in which people may have very different thoughts about the ‘world’. We're pleased to have invited Dr. Gillian Youngs to give a talk about her own initial experience in the virtual environment as she is developing research in this area now. Again, thanks for all your active participation and wonderful contribution to Creative Cuppa. We’re looking forward to seeing you all next time!

Video links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WtGpywsLSE (online community - forum-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRkMGED7LYE (SparkPeople.com's Free Support Community)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAnjz619SUc (Sichuan Earth Quake 12 May 2008)

Jin Shang
06/04/2009