Workshop #1 : Dori Tunstall

The spring semester has started off well, although, I'm a little anxious about revisiting my conflicting thoughts on the Internet. What has brought these conflictions to mind once again was our first workshop of the semester.

First, I must explain the workshops. Meredith has arranged for a few guest lecturers for the semester (bios here), they do a lecture at the College of Design and then a workshop with the GD grads. Our first guest was Dori Tunstall, design anthropologist and strategic planner. She challenged us to think about communities and even more specifically "digital communities".

Before her arrival we had to do some readings:
The Anthropology of Online Communities
by Samuel M. Wilson & Leighton C. Peterson
The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goal
from History of Religions by Victor Turner
The last one I need to get the name of.

All the readings proved to be helpful for our 2 day workshop with Dori. She introduced us to a model that is used to analyze and understand community; she had previously used this model in the corporate environment of Sapient to help define their team communities (I had Hallmark flashbacks when seeing this). The model uses five experiential elements: Agency, Organizational Structure, Relationships, Life Goals, and Historical Consciousness.

Our assignment was to chose a "digital community" and analyze it against the model. This is where the conflictions began. Personally, I do not actively participate in any online communities. I am a "lurker" but not a participant. Facebook and LinkedIn are technically the only ones I have a profile on now and I am still trying to figure out my positions in those spaces. So when faced with analyzing a community I found that I was struggling with what that is. I went to tripadvisor.com and lastfm.com and found that I would have to invest too much time working my way through the ins and outs of those communities. I ended up choosing one that is very simple and special to a select few. See my pdf for the details and analysis.

** Side note, as I write this the 60 minutes special is featuring the
23 yr old that started Facebook.