The online community that I'm exploring is called VampireFreaks.com. At first glance, I assumed it would be a website in which people who believed they were vampires found a refuge. However, I could not have been more wrong. VampireFreaks is actually a scarier, bloodier version of facebook. It is full of underage boys and girls embracing what VampireFreaks deems, "the Industrial Gothic Culture." The scariest part is that these teens have next to no limits on what they can post. Many of the girls are barely clothed, exposing themselves in their pictures and sending explicit messages to other users.
The aspect of the site that I explored was the message boards in which people can post topics for other people to respond to. While many of them are innocent enough, a lot of them are extremely inappropriate for minors to be viewing.So far, this has been my biggest concern... just how much children are being exposed to on this site. There are no age restrictions, and while they do claim to be policing the site, I have not seen a lot of positive censorship at work. The message boards, while they do contain some helpful topics about bullying and other social issues, also serve as negative influences, informing users about things such as "how to roll a joint."
