For Monday’s class my group read “Living Inside the (Operating) System: Community in Virtual Reality” by John Unsworth.  The idea that arose in class in regards to the relationship between this reading and the other groups’ readings was about how the reality of capitalism was subliminally woven into the other texts, even though my group’s was dedicated to this idea for the most part.  Capitalism is the world that I’m familiar with and things like research funding, patents, and work for pay are just a part of the way the world works to me. So that point really gave me another opportunity for reflection on how the way I see the world is not necessarily the world.

In regards to the part of my reading that focussed on what Unsworth meant when he talked about a “virtual community”, as we were going through our jigsaw discussions, I tried to picture how these kinds of discussions could be simulated in the digital world.  In a way, I am paying tuition in order to be a part of discussions like this, but linking this whole image back to the question of what place an open-source digital environment plays in capitalism, I wonder how much of my educational experience could be outsourced to a digital environment, and what does that mean for all this money I am paying in order to be here.  I’m starting to realize that our world is still sort of growing into its own potential as far as digitization is concerned.  It makes me really curious what sorts of changes I’ll see in the next few decades of my life and what affect that will have on the way we structure our society.