Topic 1 = Explain the concept of digital “visitors” and “residents”.

Digital world is one of the main concepts that play’s a big part in people’s lives. Digital devices surround us in our lives and my understanding of the detail device is; it takes some input, processes it and gives some output. The input given, produces some output for example when using a microwave digital screen you can select what type of food you want to warm up, it allows you to select the time and it shows a stop watch on the screen to help you start/stop the process. The output will be the warm food; indeed this is an example of digital device at home. However digital devices are not limited to homes, they are in offices and also in global use, such as web and a good examples of it are: Google, Facebook and Twitter Etc. A digital user doesn’t have an age range, characters or a pattern that can separate them from each other they all just like normal people at certain ages. However some use the web more than others and study shows that young people use some tools more actively than older people D,S. White & A. Le Cornu (2011). This can differentiate digital users into two groups “Visitors” and “Residence”.

Visitors

In a nutshell my research found that the visitors are people who use digital devices or web as a tool that they can use when they want to perform a task in digital world and when completed they put it a way. A good explanation provided by D,S. White & A. Le Cornu (2011) he defines that “the visitor understand web as an untidy garden tool shed”. They have targeted goal or task they go into the shed select a specific tool to attain the task, when task is over they put the tool back to the shed. When they perform task on the web they do not create profiles or leave a trace of their presence then their identity become invisible and the users stay anonymous. There are various reasons why their activity has to stay invisible by law (White, et al. 2009).

Residence

On the other hand residence users are individuals who use web or digital devices everyday almost at all the times, they spend most of their daily time on web for chatting, shopping, online gaming or more professional work such as banking etc. They would like to maintain that regularly. A study show that the residence users treat the web as a cluster of friends D,S. White & A. Le Cornu (2011). The other report show the residence users would like to have some sort of arrangement software that can maintain their relationship between services D. White (2008) e.g. PayPal etc.

Comparison between visitors and residence is quite simple. Visitor spend much less time in the digital world, they come to the web with a goal then they perform their task and leave without leaving any traces behind. Whereas residence users come to web with or without any reason when they complete any task instead of leaving the web they stay on the web and spend their free time as well, they love online chats, games, online communication and they prefer some sort of system to maintain that consistency of their digital world because they move so fast between services they forget about others. An example could be people who write blogs, answer questions on stack overflow, commenting on twitter etc.

References

David, S. White & Alison Le Cornu. (9th August 2011). Visitors and Residences: A new topology for online engament . Available: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049%20https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/%7Etefko/Courses/Zadar/Readings/Selwyn%20dig%20natives,%20Aslib%20Proceedings%202009.pdf. Last accessed 6th February 2015.

David White. (23^rd July 2008). Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’. Available: http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2008/07/23/not-natives-immigrants-but-visitors-residents/. Last accessed 6^th February 2015.

White, et al. (2009). OxIS. Available: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049%20https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/%7Etefko/Courses/Zadar/Readings/Selwyn%20dig%20natives,%20Aslib%20Proceedings%202009.pdf#9. Last accessed 7th February 2015.