(Picture retrieved from FunnyWall.com)
To Vine, Or Not To Vine?
Social Networking sites over the years have allowed people to express themselves online, and to create their identity. However, exaggerated ones identity may become. With the help of other social network users and of the social norm in today's world, people seem to become somebody completely different with the help of a social network.
As Van Luyn (2015) discusses in her lecture, a single person is not the only one contributing an identity to a single person, object, or text. On the Social Networking video site Vine, the virtual space seems to create a narrative that lets people enjoy themselves through others identities. Some videos such as the infamous 'Ice Bucket Challenge' was created to help promote awareness of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, However, this internet sensation quickly turned into a meme, which developed a charity, into a parody.
As discussed by McNeill (2012), she agrees the virtual age "Complicates the definition of the self". McNeill also argues that people produce online selves, which in turn, is making it hard to define where the human is, not by means of location, but of identity. McNeill also later states in her text that "(Cyberspace) has been designed to become part of users' daily lives, and to shape their offline narratives and selves in Facebooked ways". Which can also be compared to Vine.
As also discussed by Van Luyn (2015) and McNeill (2012), social networking sites, as within the real world, have created 'social norms', which some believe to aid in the development of 'created self'. So when Mark Zuckerburg states (via McNeill, 2012) that one creates an 'authentic' self on Facebook - or any other social networking site, for that matter - it is hard to actually put into context where ones 'self' ends, and ones 'created self' starts.
References:
Funny-wall.com,. (2015). Hidden Identity | funny-wall.com. Retrieved 4 September 2015, from http://funny-wall.com/animals/funny-hidden-identity/
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
Van Luyn, A. (2015). Network Narratives: Intertextuality. Lecture, James Cook University.
Hi Sam, great post once again. You have made some very good points in this blog post. To add to your point about Vine turning a charity into a parody, I think that Vine is a parody in many ways, for example "White people be like..."
ReplyDeleteAlso, as McNeill (2012) said, our interactions with the software as well as others constructs our online identity, and this could be applied to Vine in the way that genre constructs people's identity. To elaborate, as I mentioned before about "white people be like...", usually if one person makes a video like that it has a domino effect, and many other people will make Vines of the same type. This point could also tie in with your final note on 'social norms' which construct Vine. In this day and age with technology being so ingrained in our lives, we are very much becoming 'cyborgs'.
Reference:
McNeill, L. (2012). There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography. Biography, 35(1), 65-82. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/