Balancing individuality and conformity.

How the forums of Ultimate-Guitar.com look. http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=11

On ultimate-guitar.com, individuality and conformity are balanced, but the two often affect each other. One such example would be how people can be individuals by choosing to speak openly about certain things on the website’s forums. On topic specific forums about genres of music, one could claim to be a fan of reggae and emo music, while on the open forum known as “the Pit”, people can talk about how they are an openly gay or what their specific political affiliation is. The way conformity comes into this is how while everyone has an opinion on certain issues, moderators on the site will not allow for rude behavior towards others on the site. In this way, everyone can be an individual and have their own opinion, but they are not allowed to organize against or be hateful towards another group that they disagree with, thus; they must conform to the Ultimate-Guitar’s guidelines on proper forum use. Ultimate-Guitar is an online community, but it features very little diversity since the primary users of the site are white male guitarists, because for the most part, most users of the site are guitarists, and most guitarists are white males. Diversity, however; is accepted since most of these users find it interesting that others share a common thing with them.

Introducing New Technology Into a Community

Introducing computer technology, which would include more specifically iTunes and access to music, into communities such as those in Africa, which may not have had access to them in any way before, would, I believe, have a positive impact on their community as a whole. Giving everyone in an African village access to iPods and music would help link the people of that village together in positive ways because they would be able to bond over something outside of just the day to day happenings of their village. Music is known as the great communicator for a reason, and with access to music, the people of the village would, though indirectly, become more connected to the larger world community. If given these devices, I believe these communities would be more effective in accomplishing their community goals. Farmers would be more productive listening to music as opposed to listening to nothing, because it would help break the monotony of such work. I think that there would be some instances in which this technology would be more distracting than helpful, but this is true any sort of technology introduced to a community; there are always those people who use something in excess and end up being less productive as a result. It’s possible that this technology could positively or negatively impact this specific village’s relations with other African tribes. This could lead to several results. The village could use the technology for good and trade it with other tribes for supplies or could possibly offer it as a sign of good faith to the surrounding tribes. On the other hand, the other villages could become jealous of the technology the community has and attack it for its technology. This is why such an experiment has the capability of becoming a perilous one.

Is community service important to the local community?