Its ‘Like’ totally me

Image 1: Likeoholic

 In McNeill’s (2012, p.73) ‘There is no I in network’ she explores that social media identities are more collaborative pieces of work with input from friends as opposed to the subjectivity of the individual. When I started a new profile for Facebook, I felt I could portray myself to a new audience in a way that I wanted them to see me. However, as time went on I found that I was not posting pictures or comments that best illustrated me, but I began to post things that I knew my audience would literally ‘like’. My Facebook profile changed from something that I believed was innately personal to a collective of friends’ feedback, posts to my wall and approval of things that I posted.

Facebook provides a unique way of telling a person’s story. It not only allows me to publish my life in the moment to my friends, and potentially to a world audience; but more interestingly, as my lecturer Kuttainen (2016) pointed out, virtual social media gives me the ability to completely change and rewrite my history like no other form of medium can. Though my exploration of Facebook, I found I was able to delete previous comments, pictures and event whole events that I found embarrassing now. It felt like travelling in time and altering the past.

As an avid Facebook user it never occurred to me that identity was an issue. However, as the article ‘catfishing’ exemplifies there are many people who are willingly and actively deceiving others under a new alias. Initially, it seemed odd that people are completely changing their identity online and disregard their ‘real’ selves. The internet seems to have created a battleground our real and virtual selves. Is it possible that without the constraint of physical appearance, that the internet strips away enables users to become their ‘true’ selves?

Reference 

Hanuka, A (n.d). Likeoholic [Image] Freeyork. Retrieved September 1, 2016, from http://freeyork.org/art/powerful-illustrations-asaf-hanuka

Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, lecture 6 Networked narrative. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/

McNeill, L. (2012). There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography. Biography, 35(1), 65-82. DOI:10.1353/bio.2012.0009

 

Peterson, H. (2013, January, 17). 'Catfishing:' The phenomenon of Internet scammers who fabricate online identities and entire social circles to trick people into romantic relationships. Daily Mail Australia Online. Retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2264053/Catfishing-The-phenomenon-Internet-scammers-fabricate-online-identities-entire-social-circles-trick-people-romantic-relationships.html