Sveiki!
This week is midterm week for the RHMS 270 class! And I noticed for the first time how social media brought the class together. I received e-mails and tweets from classmates suggesting to work together to create study guides and form study groups in preparation. This got me thinking about the different communities we are part of. Like we discussed in one of our classes, we are all part of many communities of different sizes. For me, I am part of the International community, the Latvian community, the LC community, the RHMS270 community and many more real and online.
Earlier in class we had to read an article about a small town community in Mt. Grove, where a new forum called Topix had taken off. It had given people the anonymity and power to write all the gossip they could think of. Since this was a small town, everyone was part of this online community and everyone knew each other. This is a good example of technological determinism, where technology changes us, as it changed this community from purely innocent gossip, to a destructive community of bullying and shaming. This forum resulted in horrible consequences such as suicide.
Back home, in Latvia, we had a similar forum introduced, that me and all of my classmates immediately signed up for. It was called “Formspring.me”. I’m not sure if this site still exists, but the concept was- you could anonymously ask any question to anyone you wanted. This didn’t result nearly as badly, but it did become the source of online bullying and insecurity for many people and classmates.
I think both of these examples illustrate how size does matter,in certain sized communities, social media and online forums can be dangerous. But it is very hard to determine the size of when it becomes dangerous. When it’s a tiny community of just friends, then bullying and such negative consequences don’t usually happen, because you know you’ll have to face the person later. When it’s a huge community, then the bullying and rumors disappear after a while because of all the new information coming in each minute. So what is the size of a community for which it is dangerous to bring in social media and access to anonymity?
Side note- In continuation on my search to find a community of Latvians through Facebook, I very successfully and easily came across The Oregon Latvian Society. By simply writing “Latvians in Portland” in the Facebook search section I was able to find my local Latvian community!
Latvian in Portland 
Anna, your blog brought interesting points that relate to class and I totally agree with the participatory culture that our class is apart of to help each other by making study groups and material. However I do disagree a little with huge community gossip not mattering that much because it disappears with all the abundant of information that gets posted ever minute because big community gossip if targeted at one specific thing or individual can really be detrimental. The more influence gossip gets behind it the more effect it can have on an individual because more people know and are involved with it which makes people feel isolated.
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Your international take on the community questions we’ve been discussing in class was very interesting. I’ve also had experiences with sites like the one you described, and it’s crazy how much anonymity enables people to say or do things they never would in-person. But at the same time, this anonymity is what often draws people to communities that they might not otherwise be interested in. Do you think the effects of anonymity are mostly negative or positive?
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It’s hard to say, because I feel like people like to talk more about the negative effects. But I do agree with that, since anonymity takes away all responsibility and when that gets taken away people usually tend to do the things they otherwise would be ashamed to do, which are usually pretty sketchy and bad. What do you think?
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Hi Anna! First off, it’s awesome that you found the Oregon Latvian Society so quickly; I hope you’re able to better foster your connections & identity within that community. Second, I find it interesting how different platforms explode sometimes in very specialized geographical areas, like Formspring.me in Latvia and like how WhatsApp is like massive in South America but here hardly everyone uses it. Third, I like your connection between the size of the user population and the overall practices of the platform; there does seem to be an interesting first impression of correlation (i.e. in the small communities in the article about Topix, things went south really fast), and I wonder if size is indeed yet another factor on top of existing cultural norms, affordances (social cues (anonymity), replicability, storage), and the like.
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I’ve had similar experiences with anonymous sites where you create a profile and people leave questions/comments, the one that everyone used at home was “ask.fm” and it sounds pretty similar. When presented with the option of anonymity people can use it as a chance to say some pretty nasty stuff. The site’s popularity is interesting, youth across the board (whether in Latvia, Barbados or the US) just love a good place to gossip and say anonymous stuff I guess?
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Are you from a part of Latvia that is similarly small and isolated like Mt. Grove? I think that the smaller and less populated the area, the larger these problems become. Or did you experience these problems in Latvia regardless of the size?
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