A Look at Facebook Posthumously

Facebook is a great tool for communicating with friends and family from all around the globe, but what can be learned from the autobiographical narrative we leave behind after we shuffle off this mortal coil? As a BA student, and a digital native, I feel I have the flâneur’s dual vision (Prouty, 2009). I feel comfortable within the network, but I am able to view it objectively.  I have been a member of Facebook since 2010, and when joining I found the website pointless and boring. Since then I have found the website to be very helpful in terms of participating in activities such as local musical theatre productions and stand-up comedy gigs.

Picture from my own Facebook timeline

Traditional maps as a narrative reflect how a society perceives itself, and they indicate what is important to the society (Petray, 2013). These concepts can be applied to Facebook’s (at first widely detested, but then forgotten about) timeline feature. I have begun to think about what my timeline says about me, and the world I live in. I wonder what an anthropologist 1000 years from now would think. This person would be able to see a map of my life, they would see photos, my level of education, people I cavorted with, events I’ve attended, places I’ve been, and the things I am interested in.

In the way Barnes likened cyberspace to the panopticon (1977), Facebook is very much a social panopticon. In the sidebar your Facebook friends can see everything that you are ‘liking’, they can see everything you are posting. When realising that everyone can see everything that you say, you unconsciously begin to self-surveil.

This is likely why I choose to present the best aspects of my life through my Facebook timeline; I promote my upcoming comedy gigs, I ‘untag’ myself from embarrassing photographs, and I post about personal successes. I suppose, in a way, this is to align myself socially with the people I want to spend time with. Posthumously your Facebook timeline presents your life as a narrative, and you choose how it reads. ‘Every map is a purposeful selection from everything that is known, bent to the mapmaker's ends.’ (Wood, Kaiser & Abramms, 2006, p. 4). This description of a map summarises very articulately how I view my Facebook timeline.

References

References Prouty, R. (2009) A Turtle on a Leash. Retrieved from http://onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/a-turtle-on-a-leash.html

Petray, T. (2013) BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the Making of Place, Lecture 3: Space and Place. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

Barnes, G. (1997) Passage of the Flâneur. Retrieved from http://www.raynbird.com/essays/Passage_Flaneur.html 

Wood, D., Kaiser, W.L., & Abramms, B. (2006). 'The Multiple Truths of the Mappable World'. In Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World (pp.1-12). Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications.

PICTURE: https://www.facebook.com/KinkyKieran1