Visitors see the internet as a box of tool to achieve their goal. They didn’t leave any trace of their appearance, such as expression of opinions or having any ‘digital identity’. It is not because they are not technically adapted but they are more focused. It could be the individual have a great network offline that they did not need any additional online community. Visitors act based on their goal is to solve their problem so they will chose the appropriate tool and sign off. In educational aspect, most visitor’s ideology saw internet as a pool of information to pick up information. Social media and others have nothing to do with learning journey.
While Residents could be said as the next level of engagement. They perceive web as a part of their life and social space. They have community, create relationship and have a sense of ‘belonging’. They share part of their life journey on web by using social media. They also tend to expressing their-self on web. However, it does not means residents are using internet more efficient and effective than visitors.
Visitor and Residents are a term to define our engagement with the web. Visitor and residents term cover the native and immigrant term which define the engagement by age and skill or academic and technical. It is defined by the culture and motivation of the web user.
How individuals use the platform depends on the context and how they manage it. A proportion of user might use web primarily as visitor or primarily as resident. Other spectrum is using web as visitor and resident depends on the occasion and I am one of it. In doing my study or searching for information, I’m using web as a visitor. My aim is to gain reliable information or help me to do some task, once it’s accomplished I’ll sign off. While for personal life, I’m using web as a residents. Mostly for social media. Namely Facebook, twitter, Instagram, blog, and YouTube. Quite often I leave some comments to show support, opinions, or simply to say hi.
Not all platforms are designed equally, some of them are designed to be used as resident. Using it as visitor will prevent us to get the value of the platform. Another spectrum is educational, recently education move to collaborating web into the syllabus. One of the example is our online module that collaborates different platform and social media. During this module, students should use resident approach to get the most of it.
References :
White, D. (2008). Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’. Tall Blog, University of Oxford.
White,D. (2009). Visitors and Residents : the videos. Tall Blog, University of Oxford.
White, D. S., & Cornu, A. L. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement.First Monday, 16(9)
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