Information Online
I found the article by Forte to be very interesting. The idea of creating a field in order for an entire culture to identify themselves and in turn have others to be able to gather information about that culture is a concept which seems to be very positive. Forte explored the social and cultural patterns which showed the construction of the Caribbean culture and thus created a community online that reflected the real life aspects of that particular group. One quote really stood out for me when he states “web sites do not just tell stories, they contain stories within them about themselves.” This reflects the ‘ethnic resurgence’ of the Caribbean Amerindian Centre (CAC) and the idea that there is a rich amount of information available for public consumption. The formations of such web sites result in an insight to the culture that can only be achieved online with the exception of doing traditional ethnographic work. Once such a site is produced people begin to demand certain resources. Forte mentions ‘broker overload’ and the fact that too many requests can become unmanageable, people think of the computer as a thinking entity therefore it is not as conceivable to think that information must be provided by a human producer. This puts a lot of pressure on the person maintaining the site, I have never really thought of this pressure before and the fact that we cannot expect to control what information we receive. It is just taken for granted that the information is there and this is why we lose some very important sites.
