Hi, my name is Yim Lin. I am a junior in ISST in the college of Engineering. I come from New Jersey. I work at the ticket office in Willard Straight Hall and the Grad School. I have two bunnies. They're both fat. I like to sleep and wish I could be doing so right now.....
I vowed never to use blogger again when they forced me to sign up for a google account. I don’t really know what happened what I guess was that my google account expired but still existed, so there was no way for me to sign up again with it or change the password that I had long forgotten. So I signed up for a new google account but it wouldn’t let me retrieve my old blog again because it was mapped to my other account. Finally out of frustration, I switched to Xanga and swore never to Blogger again. Unfortunately, I enrolled in this class and was forced to break this sacred oath I had made.
This summer I stayed in Ithaca. Although I had found a job on Cornell campus, I wanted one off campus as well. To aid my search, I looked online, specifically at Ithaca’s Craigslist. There, many of the locals had posted various positions they were looking to fill. Not having used Craigslist much before, I began to explore the other areas. They had many things like goods for sale or room for rents, and even a personals section, all within the local area. It is essentially like the classified section in a newspaper, but better. The postings are more accurate timewise and there are a lot more of them. Craigslist serves as an extremely easy way to advertise to your local community. It’s free to post and free to browse and thus, easily accessible by just about everyone. It is a way to get the word out to the community that you have something you want, or are looking for something. If you decide to change your mind, you have that veil of anonymity to hide behind, because no one knows who you are and people are expecting some bogus postings. It also puts you on a personal level to others in a sense that you are connecting to your own community but it’s also not personal because you do not actually have to interact with them if you don’t want to.
Craigslist is most like Wallace’s “World Wide Web” category. Most people go there to seek out something they’re looking for or to advertise something. For instance, someone looking at the “items for sale” section probably went there because they already had in mind something they needed to buy. I went there because I wanted to find a job. Craigslist contains a plethora of information for those who are looking for it.
2 comments:
It is interesting what you say about the simultaneous anonymity yet social interaction that exist through Craig list. You'd think that people would be skeptical to buy something over the internet from someone they don't know, and trust that the product is good (not only in terms of working properly, but not being stolen from somewhere). There are many experiences people have had of buying something online and having it arrive only to be a disappointment. These occurrences obviously don't deter people from using the website. Also, with all the anonymity, it's surprising how trustful people are when buying from these strangers. If you went into a store and a sketchy guy was trying to sell you something he was hiding in his coat you would most likely run away. It would be interesting to read what Wallace had to say about these types of WebPages today.
Even though craigslist facilitates simultaneous anonymity, it also provides a basis to begin face to face social interaction. Craigslist sales puts you in contact with local individuals that live in the area so that you can contact them and, from my experience, meet them to exchange goods. It’s important to note that even though there is simultaneous anonymity in the very beginning, as soon as you send the seller an e-mail, you are no longer entirely anonymous. The seller can then begin to develop ideas about who you are as a person just by your e-mail address (i.e. hottiemchothot@yahoo.com, business4evr@gmail.com).
I love Alison’s example of a sketchy guy in a store trying to sell you something and there are probably people on craigslist that fit that description, however, I think the difference is that they are not soliciting you to buy from them. Instead, you contact them using asynchronous chat such as e-mail and that sometimes leads to an exchange of phone numbers (resulting in synchronous chat) depending on the item. This type of communication with the seller in turn reduces the anonymity and provides more cues to who the individual is. In a way, knowing that the seller is local, that I can meet them, and call them if they provide me a phone number (to get more than the non-verbal social cues provided by e-mail) makes me feel more comfortable about purchasing an item than I may otherwise feel buying an item from someone in Texas off of E-bay. There are ways that e-bay tries to convey a sense of confidence in sellers in the absence of emotional and personal information but that would be an entirely different and long winded discussion.
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