Practicum #5 - Sasha

So after waiting a week to see if any of the girls I sent a request to asking to be friends with on MiGente would accept me, I have only had one person accept. Sadly that means that I am still not too popular, only having two friends. I think that in order to have more friends on this site I would have to know more people in real life to add as friends. My experiences therefore are still being dominated by males seeking out a female to pursue a relationship with offline. While doing some research on the site a guy IMed me saying "I am a new member here and am single man and looking for a woman who can make me smile always." This statement alone makes me think that men are using this site as a dating tool. One other piece of information that I found that makes my research complete was on the profile of a 19 year old girl. One of the first things her profile says is "Read my personal message before u disrespect me an waste both our times!!!!" She continues later on on her page saying, "If u have no picture, do not ask to talk, and do not send an invite." More examples exist in her page making me realize that I am not the only one that is experiencing the frustration of males pursuing me on the site (I have added a screen shot of her profile page). When I asked her on instant messaging to share some of her experiences and frustrations with me, she ignored me. This makes me think that there may actually be a stereotype from Latino women towards Caucasian women but I still plan on doing more research based on this idea. Because I have come to these conclusions, I have decided to focus my attention more on other websites that host a large Latino population to try to figure out if other sites are dominated by males using the sites as a dating tool as well (although I do not think this is the case based in my experience on Facebook with my friends from Mexico. I think that websites alone dedicated to a large Latino population may be dominated by lurking males, while sites with a large range of users with various ethnicities are more dedicated to communicating between set friendships within the real world.) I also want to find out if there is in fact a stereotype from Latino women of adding/befriending Caucasian females on the Internet (which I am starting to believe is actually the case).