By Kirralee Stover
This week, being introduced to the topic of cyborgs and posthumanism, questions about our online identities arise. Social networks such as Facebook have a vast majority of users uploading posts every day. As stated in the lecture, "In a virtual space, you are not the only person constructing your identity" (Van Lyun, 2015).
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| Image: Are we becoming cyborgs? |
Online identities are constructed by everyone in the virtual world. Those who upload posts, those who comment on posts, and even those who share a post. All of these and how we interact with one another shape who we are
online, which is possibly very different from who we are in reality.
"Facebook builds on both human and posthuman concepts of the human subject in compelling, and arguably posthuman, life narratives, as its users produce and
are produced by accounts of digital life" (McNeill, 2012). Narratives are constructed quite easily online, especially self-narratives on Facebook. Every post or comment typed by a user adds to their online self. Having a virtual world at your fingertips also allows for one to construct their identity to suit how they wish to be seen, even if this means false or misleading information. In saying this however, users may also be their true self in an online world, which they feel is hard to portray in in the real world. Different version of oneself can be seen in their reality and virtuality worlds depending on how one wishes to be viewed.
Using Facebook as a tool to construct one's narrative, it may be seen that the inner cyborg is assisting to shape the narrative differently from how one would normally communicate. With the option of having two identities, it is quite easy to forget where the line is drawn and where one identity stops and the other starts. Keeping all of this in mind, is it possible we are all becoming cyborgs?
References:
Mcneill, L. (2012). There is no "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography. Biography 35.1. 65-82. Retrieved from http://www.learnjcu.edu.au
Van Lyun, A. (2014). BA 1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the making of Place. Lecture 6: Networked Narratives [PowerPoint], Retrieved from http://www.learnjcu.edu.au
Image Credits:
The New York Times. (2012). The Opinion Pages. Are We Becoming Cyborgs? Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/opinion/global/maria-popova-evgeny-morozov-susan-greenfield-are-we-becoming-cyborgs.html?pagewanted=all
You mentioned narratives being constructed quite easily online. I would like to agree with that idea. In the virtual world it is common to assume that the things you see are random. Well in fact that is not as accurate as most think. The internet allows for mash ups, re-edits and collaborations (Van Luyn, 2015). These are what make the seemingly random and meaningless stuff a whole lot less random. This is done through the linking of what is called a “narrative”. Each time we use the internet we leave traces of us behind. This allows for online searches and interactions to be become exclusively “tailored” for us (McNeil, 2012). These searches and interactions reference, in form and content, narratives that have gone before them. Thus making another link in the massive network of links that is narratives. And with all these links there is bound to be a reference between two supposedly random things on the internet.
ReplyDeleteReferences:
McNeill, L. (2012). There is no "I" in network: Social networking sites and post human auto/biography. Biography, Vol 35, No 1. pp. 65-82. DOI: 10.1353/bio.2012.0009.
Van Luyn, A. (2015). BA1002: Our space: networks, narative and the making of place, Lecture 6: Networked narratives: intertextuality. [PowerPoint slide]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au