Tuesday, September 07, 2010

homes

A new thought that I got while mindlessly trolling in cyberspace is this – we all have LOTS of houses (per person) on the Internet. You may ask, what do I mean by that?

Well, technically it all started when I was waiting for my email inbox to load on Hotmail, and I stared on the word “Spaces”. It dawned on me that we all own some type of property in cyberspace. Facebook. Windows Live Spaces. Twitter. MySpace, Tagged, even Flickr, or Blogger, for that matter.  These are in some form or another, houses for us in the global village.

Why do I refer to these as our residential space? A house is defined as a personal living space. It is a place where we can seek refuge from the outside world or the ravages of weather and climate. It is a place where we can just be ourselves. These cyber dwellings are, in some manner, identical to the one we have in the real world. We seek privacy from prying eyes by putting up privacy settings on the sites we own. We personalize it according to our whims – put up cute GIF images in MySpace; apply themes in Tagged; put little widgets on Blogger to help us do or gauge something, akin to appliances and gadgets in a real home. We put photos on our Facebook profile. More importantly, it is there to DEFINE and DIFFERENTIATE us as individuals. Aside from entertainment, we also personalize these websites to help us in daily matters – for instance, SkyDrive is a file storage and sharing service that allows users to upload files to the computing cloud, then access them from a web browser. It uses Windows Live ID to control access to the user's files, allowing them to keep the files private, share with contacts, or make the files public. (Wikipedia, 2010) Uploading files to this place allows us to have access to some files when we do not have our personal computer to access anywhere and anytime, provided we get access to Windows Live. Twitter is not just for mindless updating either; we could post information, links to useful site, and even provide answers to someone else’s query when we have the answer to it. WOW, I sound SO damn technical.

What makes it more like a home, in my opinion, is that we could be ourselves in those places. Through personalization, it adds a touch of us to what could otherwise be a bland, carbon-copy page. Different backgrounds colors and patterns, font size, type and colors, widgets to be added on, these are just something that allow our pages to stand out from another person’s. But most importantly is the content that we present: we each have our own style of presenting information (a BIG exception to the copy-pasters out there), our style of writing, and our own voice. There is something more distinct than having different combos of colors and fonts and that is PERSONALITY :D



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