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Plugged in. Taken from: Tastebuds |
Is the narrative of your life
being told by the machine that you are plugged into all day? Although Twitter
is full of individual stories, it is as a whole that these tweets form a
narrative of social interaction. As Dr. Van Luyn stated in this week’s lecture
“In a virtual network, you are not the only person constructing your
identity", this is how most social networks work, collating information
from your profile and communications with others within the network to tell
‘your’ story.
Twitter is not your average
social networking site, with a 58 million tweets per day
average, Twitter tells too many 'stories' for any one of them to be seen as a
narrative of a singular person. Twitter is a "Hive mind" born out of
the everyday tweets of the users - (Mcneill 2012).
This shows how in a way we are all cyborgs slaved to our network(s), a
hybrid of machine and organism - (Haraway 1991). As we have to look at my
Twitter profile to see my cyber-narrative, it shows that I am just a
name, there is no personal information like you would expect to see,
no birth date gender or location. I am a faceless drone in the 'Hive'
following and reading tweets of other drones.
Myths, song, and stories were living archives, storehouses of practical information - alomost everything needed to survive (C. Berndt and R. Brdent 1978). As a society we have replaced our
myths ,songs, stories with the search for knowable truth and 'consumer identity,
defined by what the market offers' (Mcneill 2012). And as such we have, as
Stanner (1953) put it - got no dreaming.
References:
Dr. Van Luyn A. (2013) Our space: Networks, Narratives and the Making of Place, Lecture 4
Mcneill L. (2012) There is no "I" in network: social networking sites and post human auto/biography
Harraway D. (1991) A cyborg manifesto; science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century
Stanner W.E.H (1953) White man got no dreaming
Berndt C. & Brdent R. (1978)The Aboriginal Australians
Great post Adam,
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to see what each social networking site offers, and I agree with the fact that twitter is a somewhat different social networking site. I often find it an odd one too! In exploring twitter, I am always overwhelmed by the content. The tweeting, re-tweeting and tweets about tweets! I think that you would also wonder where people get the time to do all this almost everyday. There is no way that I could keep up with what is going on, when it is also interesting to think that you can keep track of what social interactions you have away from the internet. As McNeill states, "consider how the network can be a posthuman practice, even with humanist foundations. "
References:
McNeill, L. (2012). There is no ‘I’ in network: Social networking sites and posthuman auto-biography.