And Finally....

This will be my final posting in this Blog, in preparation for handing in at the end of this week. The module has been enjoyable, to the extent that it has reacquainted me with a few old websites I’d nearly forgotten existed and helped me find a few more of similar interest. Strangely, it also helped me with my paid work – I came across a lot of Tech forums that have helped me no end in Web Design.

Overall, I think that the COOL forums created a bad impression of online communities to begin with, and reminded me of one of the very reasons I began to give up online communities – the fact that the interesting people aren’t necessarily outweighed, but are usually out-shouted by the less constructive people with nothing to say. That’s the irony, the less a person has to say on a subject, the more rubbish they speak. And it gives a platform for people to express non constructive ‘views’ from a blanket of anonymity. Do you think that people on the COOL forums would have launched into such personal attacks on other students in person? In the classroom perhaps? Unlikely, because then people would know who they were. Arguably, the fact that our names are on the posts should still remove the anonymity, but I believe I could have kept my anonymity by simply not telling people my surname in person.

But that doesn’t exclusively apply to the COOL forums. Every chat room will always suffer from someone else trying to upset the users – such as the people that may go onto a gay & lesbian message board just to type a derogatory comment. But as with life, there will always be idiots, so it’s a lot easier to find ways to ignore them rather than wait for them to go away.