Topic 1: Digital Visitors and Residents – Reflective Summary
Beginning my UOSM 2008 blog about the concept of distinguishing and differentiating users proved not only interesting in and of itself, but also enlightening in that it had never crossed my mind that we might be able to categorise every user on the web in one sliding scale between being a resident and visitor.
Tamara Manton showed in her blog interestingly that on top of actions being on a continuum of visitor and resident, that one can also break activity down between personal and professional use. This means that while conventionally one would assume professional work would be more linked to visitor-like behaviour, if part of your professional work is promoting a product or company via videos or ads on youtube or as a representative of a company on twitter then we can see perhaps that as the web grows, the way people use the web may increase, and therefore as that happens, our oversimplified prior definitions of web usage will have to adapt with it.
In this way we may think of the web as a living and evolving organism, or perhaps as a city, as Bartosz Paszcza puts it. Because of this, the users not only adapt to the changes of the web, they are also the instigators of the very change they see, so really we may define these changes and how the web is used as the societal and psychological advancements in how we seek to embrace the use of the web, and how to push the boundaries in terms of what it is capable of.
Seeing how far the web has come in the last 20 years is simply testament to its unique ability to give each individual a greater voice than ever before. Despite this, there will always be visitors who seek to keep their digital footprint as minimal as possible, however for the rest of us, there is clearly an immense potential to further our lives professionally, whilst allowing us to socialise more thoroughly and completely than ever before.
Commented
Here: https://paszcza.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/visitors-and-residents-of-the-online-city/
And here: https://tamaramanton.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/digital-residents-and-digital-immigrants/
