Wired to Another World :: Technology Computers Internet Papers

Wired to Another World So a duck walks into a convenient store and says, â€Å"Hey you got any gwapes?† Annoyed the clerk responds â€Å"No we don’t have any grapes.† The next day the duck comes back into the store and asks the clerk, â€Å"Hey you got any gwapes?† The clerk replies, â€Å" Didn’t I tell you yesterday we don’t have no grapes! You come back in here asking for grapes and I’ll staple you beak shut, got it?† So the next day the duck walks into the convenient store and says. â€Å" Hey you got any staples?† The clerk replies, â€Å"No, no staples†. So the duck asks, â€Å"Well than you got any gwapes?† (â€Å"All Work and No Play Makes Eddy Go Crazy 2/15/03). I heard this joke from Wahoo, a person I met on an online community for the television show Friends. I had requested that anyone with any jokes leave them in my thread because I needed a good laugh to relieve my stress from school. I was requested to join a online â€Å"community† by my writing professor and then decide if it truly was a community. Webster’s dictionary defines community as â€Å" a unified body of individuals†¦an interacting population of various kinds of individuals† (233). Although many people dismiss online communities as silly and a waste of time, they actually provide many average people with a place to socialize at the end of the day or retreat to on a work-break when everyone else they know is busy. I chose the Friends online forum because I enjoy the show and watch it every week. I figured that it would be easy for me to connect with people and start conversations. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. When I visited the site I noticed that the majority of the topics had little or nothing to do with Friends. Simply put, it was people talking about cars, movies, love lives, and any other subject on someone’s mind. I found this interesting since this was a forum dedicated to a television show. But it did remind me of how people would act if they attended an automobile convention, for example. Although automobiles are the main topic, people would diverge and speak of other issues. Of course there where topics pertaining to the show, however most of the conversation where so precise that often times I couldn’t remember the exact episode they were speaking of.