How we did our final product.

My group and I filmed a short video regarding our topic, "Blogshop scams". It was derived from a combination of all our past experiences while we did online shopping and how we actually got cheated by them. The common cases that we have come across are those people who goes missing in action after we have paid them the money. They created a fake account online and disclose little information about themselves, then do such business, swindling the money of naive people like us. This did not happen only just once, but quite a few times. I did a mindmap on paper and thereafter did it on my laptop, as shown below.

But after we were cheated, we couldn't do anything to locate the person so it was kind of hard to report the person, hence we just let them run away scot-free.

Blogshop scams.

My group is going to work on a topic "Blogshop scams". Usually when people shop online, they don't have any idea of who is the owner of the blogshop is. We usually give the blogshops the benefit of doubt and trust that whatever we ordered online will be delivered to us. They may appear to be very friendly and trustworthy as stated on some of the blogshops, but we will never know if they will deceit our money.

What I've come across is a blogshop that is doing good business and providing good services to the online shoppers, and the identity that they revealed about themselves is that they are friendly and won't scam. When they have gained the trust of their customers, they slowly diversify into many other blogshops under one main owner. Considering that the expanded blogshops are also run by the same owner, many people trusted it and bought from them. That is when the swindle starts, because they have already got hold of the payments made by the buyers and the buyers have no clue who they are, hence they can get away easily with the money. The people who did business with them wouldn't know how to contact them as little information were given about them.

What I feel about such behavior is that everyone can choose to take up any identity they want, so it's up to others whether they want to believe what you choose to show. It isn't right to cheat people of their money, and that goes without saying. The blogshop owner has misused their trust for them and taken their trust for granted. I'm pretty certain that there are also a lot of other swindlers out there, who creates fake accounts on social networking sites to sell their unwanted stuffs and finally running away scot-free after getting hold of the money. Therefore one thing everyone should be wary of is not to be too sure that online blog shops wouldn't cheat your money.

Internet.

An internet persona is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites. Some internet users prefer to be anonymous, and only reveal varying amounts of personally identifiable information. Some can even be deceptive about their identity.

In some online contexts like internet forums, instant messaging, online games, users can represent themselves visually by choosing an avatar, an icon-sized graphic image. For instance people define explicitly their identity by creating user profiles in social network services such as Facebook. The identities that people define in the social web are not necessarily reliable. For example studies have shown that people lie in their profiles about their personal information as they do not want to disclose too much information about themselves on the net. It points out that whenever an individual interacts in a social sphere they portray a mask of their identity. The online mask does not reveal the actual identity of a person.

An online identity that has acquired an excellent reputation is valuable for two reasons. Firstly, one or more persons invested a great deal of time and effort to build the identity's reputation. Secondly, other users look to the identity's reputation as they try to decide whether it is sufficiently trustworthy. It is therefore unsurprising that people use their online identities to host sales.

What is identity?

To me, identity is what you choose to show to others. Identity combines how I see myself and how others see me. Identity may appear to be about one's personality and the sort of person that one is. Personality describes qualities individuals may have, such as being outgoing or shy, internal characteristics, but identity requires some element of choice.

In the cyber world, people may not deliver themselves to others who they really are because they can choose to hold a fake identity. What you think people described themselves to be on their profiles may not be what they actually are behind their screens.