Our Internet Façade

Our Internet Façade

Having a ‘new’ identity in Twitter has enabled me to act as someone who would be considered “unknown.” If not completely, fairly close to invisible. I chose a new identity to really get the perspective of a small fish in the big blue sea of twitter. With this new identity, there are questions about what’s real about the users of twitter, and how real we allow ourselves to be on social networks. 

I think that the real versions of ourselves are more true than false. Some aspects of our profiles may be fake, like the name we use or the pictures of "ourselves" we post, but our true selves (what we like and how we describe our selves and what we prefer), always rises above these falsities. Is it in fact that virtual, social places we interact with that enable us to create an idealistic version of ourselves?

                                                                   Image 1: Retrieved from: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3uc1fx/

As Dr. Van Luyn stated in this weeks lecture “Location is transformed into place through art and stories. “ (Van Luyn, 2013) The space in which we interact with others becomes our place. 

So far what I have taken away from twitter is that it is a extremely personal level of communication. It seems as if every  thought is projected. I also find that it is a great tool for people getting to know each other. The only difference in most cases, you are nowhere near any of those people in real life.

As Tuan (1991) states “The written text, which is both more private and more public than the spoken word, has its unique powers of transforming reality.”  For me this raises the idea of how we all customise our "profiles" what we choose to display, true or not, is a form of our reality.

References

Tuan, Y. (1991). Language and the Making of Place: A narrative-descriptive approach. In Annals of   the Association of American Geographers, 81(4), 684-696. 

Van Luyn, A. (2013). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the Making of Place, Lecture 5. Stories and Place. [Power Point Slides]

                        Retrieved from: http://www.learnjcu.edu.au

Image credits

Quickmeme (n.d) Image 1: Confession Bear                  

Retrieved from: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3uc1fx/