Rock Climbing Forum

This assignment was a hard one for me to complete. I am taking a full load of classes at Oregon State, then taking some additional classes at my local community college, and I work as a chemist full time. This means that I have very little free time to do much of anything. One of the requirements that I made for myself when it came to choosing a community to join, was that it had to be one I could participate and log onto while I was at work. Many community sites are blocked at worked for various reasons like “mature content” or “dating website” even though they have nothing to do with dating or adult content.

I thought it would be fun to join a community that I was interested in and could learn something from. When I do have free time I love to be outdoors running, road biking, or rock climbing. I did some searches on these topics and I found rockclimbing.com. This is a very large website which has a lot of different features. There are sections devoted to informational articles about new products or new climbing areas, and sections set up for discussion forums. There is also a section in which you can create a profile and list out all of your climbing accomplishments and then use this to search for climbing partners in your area.
Over the past two weeks I read and contributed to the various discussion boards on the website. Some of the discussions were very interesting and educational, where others were being used as a place to complain and gripe. I believe that I was accepted into this community because of the responses I received when I posted responses. I approached these discussion boards in the same way I would have approached any conversation with people in real life. I do not like to start arguments, nor do I react to peoples insulting words.

There is quite a lot of rudeness and unkindness on this website. There are lots of discussion posts where people use language which I do not think is appropriate for a general use forum. There are also many cases of people using all capital letters, and just being flat out rude to other people. In other cases people would ask questions and would get sarcastic responses from others. An example of this was a guy asking for advice on popping or not popping a blister on his foot. Many responses were very good, but a few were similar to this one, “Pop it and have your dog lick it. You'll be amazed how fast it will heal. Dog saliva is like magic on wounds. Don't ask how I know this.” In my opinion, I do not understand why a person would even respond like this to a stranger they may not really know.
I think that our society has become accustomed to websites and forums where you can interact with others behind a computer screen. It makes people say and respond in ways that may not in a face to face conversation. I think that not many people would have the nerve to jump into a strangers’ conversation and say something completely rude or even yell at them.

In Woods and Smith they say that “Despite the distances that can separate them, people have an intrinsic need for community” (122). This was exactly true on rockclimbing.com. People who participated in this community live in places throughout the world, which shows that everyone wants to belong and be a part of the group. Like Woods and Smith said, this self created community does have rules and will “regulate members through sanctions” (139). In the forum I belonged to, this was the case and there were moderators who would read through posts giving warnings to participants who were getting out of line.

I think that this was a good experience, and although I do not participate regularly in forums like this, it is nice to see that large groups of people can get together and have constructive conversations and disagreements with each other.