Unit 5: Building Community: Metaworlds and Visual Chat.
Task Five starts off by talking about Virtual Reality Environments. The most common ones are metaworlds, or visual chat. The first metaworld was created in 1985. Several of the visual chats are Active World and Worlds.com. In many metaworlds, people can chat, play, and interact with others from around the world. An avatar is your online persona. With your avatar, you can chat and make basic gestures and facial expressions. This chapter talks a lot about vZones and newHorizons, two different metaworlds that they say are very accessible and easy to use. When you first sign up for newHorizons, you need to select an avatar. Every new avatar looks the same. Tokens, which are collected by spending more time online, are used to buy new clothes and looks for your avatar. Virtual reality chat spaces are a great way for people to learn what it feels like to be part of an online community.
Task 6: Constructing Identity: Personal Homepages and Webcams
Personal webpages allow people to share things about them with others. With webpages, things that are private and things that are public seem to blur together. Personal Webpages allow people to communicate about parts of their life that most people do not know. There are many different tools that you can use to analyze webpages. There are several types of personal homepages. They include professional homepages and personal homepages. Professional homepages are more about their public life and do not include a lot of information on private matters of the individual. Personal homepages are where people share their stories and private life detail. Many groups of people are using personal webpages to communicate their identity. For gay people, the internet and personal homepages provide an excellent opportunity to come out. They are able to seek support and see that they are not alone. It is a lot easier to do online because offline they are discriminated against. Webcams have been increasing in popularity. People have started looking at and chatting throught webcams instead of personal homepages.
