Week 4 - Tutorial Reflections

Following on from last weeks discussion about the parallels/differences between physical and virtual communities, I introduced the group to my idea that had been forming through the week on the engagement we have with our virtual communities vs our physical. The point I was following was that it appears we are far more in touch with what is happening in our virtual communities at large. An example of this is when we open facebook we immediately go into the news feed and see what our wider community is doing. Alternatively, when we wake up we are first faced with ourselves, then our housemates/family and it's not until we actually seek out our local cafe or shops or notice board that we discover what our local community is up so. 

Having defined this hierarchy in a diagram, it led us onto thinking about the boundaries of both our physical and virtual worlds. In a virtual world, it may seem like we are not constrained but in fact there are boundaries to what we can see, access and modify similarly to physical boundaries. The bottom of this diagram looks at how a boundary may be changed, whether it is just expanding the content but maintaining the same rules and parameters or by changing these rules to modify the edge of the boundary. The latter is where we are more interested in looking into as it suggests it is possible to begin interactions between different territories.