The Shadow Biographer

Following our topic of Narratives last week, we continue to look at how the virtual networks affect our self-narratives. We concluded last week with looking at how people are aware that they are being watched on twitter. However, this week’s reading and lecture highlights how not only our post affects our virtual self-narrative but everyone in our network and even those far who are connected to us from another degree.

Figure 1

As Kuttainen (2016) restated in this week’s lecture, “networks are two or more hubs linked by some kind of relationship with each other. Embedded in networks are notions of communication, exchange, community and self, reality and virtuality.”

Twitter’s mission is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Which demonstrates how almost everyone is connected. Despite not following each other, hashtags and common followers can connect everyone together.  This in turn, allows everyone’s tweets to affect each other, altering everyone’s virtual self-narrative.

Virtual networks such as Twitter are popular as they address the “demands for social connection and self-performance” allowing the user to use it in everyday life (McNeill, 2012, p. 66). This ends up allowing the site to become shadow biographer, having the power to add to our virtual self. Twitter shows this through how in 2014, they had started showing tweets of people you don’t follow in your timeline (Meyer, 2016).

The overall concepts of authenticity and self are fabricated differently to reality. Similar to Facebook, Twitter uses data mining questions and prompts to ensure that users keep posting as the website would not function without its users. As a result, this ensures that we keep some sort of our authentic virtual self as we still have some freedom.

The virtual-network of Twitter, allows everyone to connect to each other despite different reasons for using the site. Everyone has different powers on the site but everyone can also affect anyone else’s self-image.

References

Company | About. (2016). About.twitter.com. Retrieved 1 September 2016, from https://about.twitter.com/company

Figure 1: How to Build a Twitter Network that Will Help You Win at Work. (2016).Fortune.com. Retrieved 1 September 2016, from http://fortune.com/2016/08/16/diverse-twitter-network-career-tips/

Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002. Week 6. [PowerPoint Slides]. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?course_id=_76323_1&content_id=_2298427_1

McNeill, L. (2012). There is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography. Biography, 35(1), 65-82.

Meyer, R. (2016). Twitter Starts to Change the Central Logic of Its Service. The Atlantic. Retrieved 1 September 2016, from http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/twitter-starts-to-change-the-central-logic-of-its-service/378650/