Portfolio Assignment #8
What I learned from this week’s lecture is that the internet is a dark place. It’s a place that allows anything and anyone to post whatever they want without the thought of who might be reading it on the other end. I thankfully have not experienced the cruel part of the internet, which would include internet trolls and cyberbullying nor have I experienced it secondhand. I always hear stories about bullying and cyberbullying and it just bothers me so much to the point that I wish it had happened to me so I could have fought back at that moment. I think my parents raised me right to tell me that no one should be given the liberty to talk about me or to me in any way, especially if they are someone unknown. This is something I’d like to teach my future kids.
For the fandom lecture, it was interesting to learn more about it since I am someone who enjoys watching Anime and have read a few fanfictions myself. The problem with fanfiction is that many try to control it when in reality it is entirely opinion-based. Fanfiction are stories created by fans, so it shouldn’t have any negativity towards it. If someone is not okay with the particular relationship or the age or the actions done in that fanfiction, then they can simply not read it at all or even create their own fanfiction in a way that they thought was more appropriate. I have read a few fanfictions myself where I was in disagreement with the relationship, but I never thought to hate on that particular fiction because it was someone else’s imagination. I never knew that there were people who actually studied the world of fandom in an educational way and it was interesting to learn what they had discovered.
So my case study has to do with online dating. I think my topic relates to the topic of internet trolls because, although it is not something I will be talking about in my paper but should be addressed, of the possibility of catfishing. The action of catfishing is to create an online dating profile pretending to be someone else. You can probably relate people who catfish with internet trolls because they are trolling others into thinking they are a particular person that they believe is better than them. Catfishing happens pretty often enough that MTV had to create a whole show about it.
