Final Paper Longer Proposal

I am still wrapping my hands around what specifically this paper should focus on and I believe with your comment Julie, I am going to argue that our reliance, or society's reliance on technology has allowed us to become so disembodied from ourselves and each other that we have given ourselves a false sense of what a community really is. Yes, there are two cases of community, those online, and those we have in real life, but we are losing sight of the fact that our real life communities need the focus more than our online communities do. If we don't realize that the latter is being neglected, the more we dive full force into our personal representations online, the further away we get from actually being connected with a real human. I will not be arguing that technology is bad, because i love it, i will focus on the fact that when technology, when and if it does, disappear, we will lose all skill to interact with one another and we will be alone. i am going to use Deborah Lupton, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Donna Haraway, Michele Willson, David Tomas, David Bell, Kevin Robins, Maria Bakardjieva. My citation list will be following shortly.....

Kaliya Hamlin....Phenomenal Woman in her own right....

I am very intrigued by Kaliya Hamlin. I love her passion and her ability to stay passionate about her cause. Kaliya has extensive knowledge and experience in designing and facilitating unconferences for professional communities. Kaliya brings together people in online communities that have a deeper basis and meaning about them. Not just because the people joining these communities eat cereal for breakfast. The tie is much more profound and Kaliya wants the online experience to be for the greater good of "online communities", not just socially, but environmentally as well. Her works focus is mainly on internet identity as well as nonviolence and spiritual activism. She attended school at UC Berkley and studied political science and human rights and worked for nonprofits while obtaining her degree. The turning point in her life was after she graduated and came across a paper titled "Augmented Social Network", and started focusing on user-centric identity. Kaliya is focusing on creating a space where there is mobility between sites, where we should have one identity within this space. She believes we should have one username and password between all sites while still being able to maintain control and privacy. I believe this is essential in online networking and all other aspects of being enthralled in any online community, banking, etc. We all at some point have visited more than one site which requires us to register, become a member, or login and at every new site, a new username and password must be created. This is fine if we only visit that one specific site, but when you are constantly visiting new sites, becoming members of new and different spaces, this can become extremely tedious. We are not always at liberty to create the username that we created for a different login because it has been taken or already is in use. I know it would definitely make my life easier if i could just have one username and password and use across all pages on the internet. She believes you can become passionate about anything at any given point/time in your life, without needing a degree in the related field. She also impressed me because she reinvested half of her own salary into promoting or back into the concept of user-centric identity.

Final Paper Proposal

I'm sort of still working out the kinks in this initial proposal, I know I want to focus on the discussion about the blurring of our two worlds: our virtual lives and our real lives and our embodiment, or disembodiment in each. I know this is somewhat broad, but I am having a somewhat hard time pinpointing my real argument.

My main focus will be on, and will incorporate a lot of Stone's concepts/ideas, how we have to keep the distinction between the two. I want to argue or show the importance of being human and what that entails, and how we are risking to lose more than gain if we completely lose our "humanness" if you will, by being completely engulfed in virtual reality and that we absolutely need a specific distinction, and that there should always be one, between the two.

I know this may not be what you are looking for Julie, but I am definitely looking for comments and suggestions on how to better formulate this paper.


Thanks!!!