I know my place...

Same flight, different experiences.  
                  Picture from Annoying Things About Plane Passengers


Anyone else feel like this in DA003-001? If territory is defined as the place we’ll defend (Petray, 2013), how do we defend the series of temporary territories we consider our personal space? As you’ll read here, it depends who you are.

There’s no fear of DVT during my regular visits to Uncommon Knowledge, a psychology forum where I’ve been a member for two years. On the forum I can (and do!) hide and observe as Prouty (2009) suggests. With a gender-free name and professing a highly liberal attitude, I’m “a prince who is everywhere in possession of his incognito” (Barnes, 1997). On-forum as elsewhere I limit my range (Petray, 2013), spending most of my time in the sub-forums where I already have an interest and largely ignoring, for example, the hypnosis section. 

Along with the self-help articles, the site markets training packages for practitioners, and products such as hypnosis recordings. Its forum is user-surveilled: members can report an offensive post for removal, reprove the author with a reply on the thread or by private message, or simply ignore the post and find something more appealing.

Wood et al (2006) clearly explain the singularity of the human experience, and in few places is this more evident than on a forum where people post their troubles and receive replies from around the world. Forum members who are much younger than I and those who struggle to write in English, for example, make me glad not to be a 20-year-old looking for a partner or a Moslem with reason to believe his family will kill him if he attempts to leave the faith.

 

REFERENCES

Barnes, G. (1997) Passage of the Flâneur. Retrieved from http://www.raynbird.com/essays/Passage_Flaneur.html

Petray, T. (2013) BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the Making of Place, Lecture 3: Space and Place. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

Prouty, R. (2009) A Turtle on a Leash. Retrieved from http://onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/a-turtle-on-a-leash.html

Wood, D., Kaiser, W.L., & Abramms, B. (2006). 'The Multiple Truths of the Mappable World'. In Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World (pp.1-12). Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications.

 
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