Every day on Instagram, an average of 95 million photos are posted, and nearly 4.2 billion likes are recorded (Instagram, 2016). Our daily photo posts are a way to communicate with each other through a rapidly evolving medium. We love to see and engage with our friends and family, even if there is no way for us to do it face-to-face. Social media is quickly becoming a post-human phenomenon, with our communication evolving from oral (speaking to each other) to literate (writing letters etc) to this age of social media. Posting images of our holidays, friends or plants has become a network narrative that the entire world actively plays a part in. "Millions of individuals... produce online selves in interaction with both people and software applications" (McNeill, 2012). It is terrifyingly easy to fake an online presence, especially on Instagram, where it is very hard to disprove suspected false images. Google search can produce millions of images that you can use to pretend you went on an incredible holiday, or that you look like a different person. They can help us create a very different persona online as opposed to the real one we have in our everyday lives.
Post humanism criticizes the human ideal, as we are not always singular, rational beings. Our society decides our emotions and who we identify as 'ourself'. It further blurs the thin line between humanity and technology. Our current digital era "complicates the definition of the self and its boundaries... dismantling and sustaining the humanist subjects" (McNeill, 2012).
Sources:
1: McNeill, L. (2012). There is no “i” in network: Social networking sites and Posthuman autobiography. Biography, 35(1), 65-82. doi:10.1353/bio.2012.0009
2: Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, week 6 notes [powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au
3: Instagram Press Page, https://www.instagram.com/press/?hl=en
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