My space, my place
By Markus Zuercher
I am finding reality through virtuality, but it is a long and perhaps
never ending journey. Of course this statement does not apply to everyone. Many
people construct virtual identities and alter egos in the form of an avatar. Travelling
like Doctor Who, not in
space but in cyberspace, replacing reality with virtuality, imposing meaning on;
and claiming their place in a virtual world (Van Luyn, 2013, pp. 6,7). This is very self-empowering,
creating and naming one’s own space, ‘to render the invisible visible’ as Tuan (1991, p. 688) argues.
Constructing a virtual “me”, was only a means to finding and defining my
own place and space. To communicate and exchange information on cyber networks,
everyone requires some sort of virtual identity. In my discussion forum, the
virtual identity is used as protection against real identity theft, cybercrime,
spammers etc. The forum is moderated and any sensitive information such as
e-mail addresses or the like are removed .
Every member of this Genealogy forum is part of a large cyber network
to help find, research and exchange information relating to personal heritage and
place of origin. The further back in time one travels, just like Doctor Who,
the harder it is to decipher the information recorded in Church books. Entries
are often made in Latin and with very bad handwriting. Some of our forum
members are linguists and specialists in reading old script. This is very
helpful in decoding documents such as this example of an 1859 Church book page. My Great-Grandfathers marriage is on this page.
Jegenstorf 1859 Marriage Book (CHURCHBOOKS
of Kirchgemeinde JEGENSTORF, 2004, pp. 176,177)
Reference list
Tuan,
Y.-F. (1991). Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive
Approach. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 81(4), 684-696. doi:
10.1111/j.1467-8306.1991.tb01715.x
Van Luyn, A. (2013). BA1002: Our
Space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, week 5 notes. [PowerPoint
slides] Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au
Picture
credit
CHURCHBOOKS of
Kirchgemeinde JEGENSTORF. (2004). Worb,
Switzerland: Lewis Bunker Rohrbach.
very interesting blog Markus! i loved it. I really enjoyed your link for Doctor Who due to the fact that i have never actually viewed the show before and dont understand much about it. When you spoke about naming you're own space and how it is quite empowering, reminded me of our tutorial this week and how i did feel quite powerful now knowing that i had named my chair and it was in my personal area.
ReplyDeleteTuan expresses that a name of an area is quite powerful and can give us a true understanding or an impression of a persona or landscape. This makes me wonder if someone changed their real name in the virtual world to a more powerful one, would people view them as more superior or change their views on them?
Tuan, Y.-F. (1991). Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Hi Markus, your explanation of the role virtual identities play in networks was well thought out and truly fascinating. It made me wonder about how my own network fosters this idea of the virtual identity as a ‘protection’ mechanism. In fact what I discovered was the complete opposite. Creating false virtual identities would defeat the entire purpose of Facebook and similar social networks. This is because they are dependent on users portraying there ‘accurate’ self in order to market appropriate consumer products. In fact Facebook stands to make a large profit from our honesty in portraying self through the ‘harnessing and selling of data’ (McNeill, 2012, p. 111). It might also be that we as consumers stand to benefit from providing autobiographical content on our page. It is greatly encouraged that we engage in liking, posting, commenting, and visiting fan pages to create our Facebook ‘identity’. Though I wonder if there is an imminent danger in this practise.
ReplyDeleteMcNeill, L. (2012). There is no “I” in network: Social networking sites and posthuman auto-biography. In Biography, 35(1), 101-118.