I felt, as I was reading the Prenska article, that my knee-jerk reaction was that I was fortunate to have grown up at the right time (mid-late 2000s), when Web 2.0 features were coming into mainstream culture. I was learning them like everyone else, and I had an advantage. My reaction to the digital immigrants was that these were relatively older users I saw on Facebook, either using ChatGPT for the first time and sharing a tacky image (see Figure 1), or exclusively using their online interactions in my local ‘rants, raves, and reviews’ to initiate arguments. My brain's intuition couldn't have been right. Is there a right way to interact with online communities? That's what constitutes me as a digital native? Are these users who use Facebook and AI in those other ways digital immigrants? Although it's a niche of folks who argue on Facebook, they still use that social media website as it was intended: to connect and interact with others online. So, what is ...
Hi all, I concluded last week's post with a diatribe about MySpace. I'd like to discuss how I interacted with and simultaneously built online communities around games in the mid to late 2000's. Specifically, I'm talking about games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft, as well as online services like Xbox Live. These services were all released earlier than I was able to play them: Runescape in 2001, Xbox Live in 2002, and World of Warcraft in 2004. These services were perhaps my experience with Web 2.0. I was interacting with them before MySpace and Facebook emerged, which were later than these game services. I'll mainly speak on World of Warcraft , but all of these services really offered the same thing: virtual communities that you could interact with and collaborate with in-game. Typed chat was always available, as was voice chat (more prevalent in Xbox Live ). World of Warcraft was so exciting to me at the time because it was the first time I'd seen a game w...