Sunday, December 5, 2010
Practicum 7- Katy
I found a post on the Lady Gaga forum that seems to sum up a lot of my entire practicum project, and what it means to be an online community. The post is titled "Stop It!!", and can be viewed at the address: http://www.ladygaga.com/forum/default.aspx?cid=454&tid=461520, and this user wrote the following: "I read a lot of different topics and posts in these forums and in almost every single one I see little monsters insulting eachother, arguing with eachother and its just horrible. This isnt our mother monsters legacy. Her legacy is for all of us to be like a familly love each other and get along with each other, so just stop it and be happy!". This post incorporates so much about what we have discussed in lecture pertaining to virtual communities. For one, the member uses the phrase "little monsters", which I have mentioned is what Gaga fans refer to themselves as, and this phrase functions as a means of distinguishing oneself from outsiders of the community. The post is addressing members being rude and disrespectful to each other, which is an aspect of online identity because users' identities are anonymous on this forum, and therefore, it appears as though many people say things on this message board that they would not say to someone's face. There are little to no consequences of saying insulting things online, and that is part of the reason why so many people engage in such behavior on this forum. Lastly, this user refers to the fact that they are like a family, and I think this is ultimately what I have discovered from this forum, that it is not just a meeting place for fans, but that fans are able to feel connected to each other through this community and eventually view each other as family.
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I think that this is an interesting take on the virtual communities. I think that with the advent of things like Twitter and Facebook fan pages, there's less of a need for separate fan communities, and the ones that I've come across are largely populated by spammers. However, with someone with as large of a cult fan base, I'm not surprised that Lady Gaga has an active virtual community. I think that the problem that's addressed by this member's post might be that people are so accustomed to interacting on SNS like Twitter and Facebook, that the exact etiquette for a fan messaging board might remain unclear, which may be why comments come out as offensive or dystopian. But I think it's interesting that the fan language that Lady Gaga uses for her fans outside of the message board comes back into the online forum, which would be completely confusing to non-fans.
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