The very hungry caterpillar
Photograph Credit: CorrectionGuy 2015
It appears that when boredom partakes and overcomes me, I discover
myself glancing through the gossip on my Facebook news feed. Various people may
consider inspecting other people’s profiles as Facebook ‘stalking’ although I consider
this to be an interesting regime. Unfortunately there are those days that I
somehow manage to crawl through voluminous amounts of profiles on Facebook and somehow
find myself on my brothers, best friends, girlfriends, cousins, sisters, brother’s
profile. I think of myself as the very hungry caterpillar, eating everything in
sight and crawling through page after page. I could be described as a person “who
take in their environments in a distracted manner.” (Prouty, 2009) or in other
words taking a walk in a ‘Flâneurs’
shoes for a day. Indeed just by looking at someone’s Facebook timeline it tells
me important features in one’s life. “They are powerful (especially because we
believe them to be representations of reality).” (Kuttainen, 2015). Weather this
information projects who they are dating, how old they are, what school they attended
or where they were born, having a Facebook profile creates a cyber-identity or
perhaps this can be reworded as having ‘a map of your life’ online. It is true
that everything posted on the internet will have the possibility of coming back
and haunting you one day. I face palm myself every time I scroll through my
profile and find statuses about cleaning my fish tank when I was 13 years old
or posting a photograph of me wearing leopard pyjamas when I was in year 9. The
time of posting these embarrassing statuses it influenced people’s opinions of
me through my cyber bid identity. My distinctiveness has been mapped out and people’s
interpretations of me are something that I will never change for the explanations
are exclusive to one ’s self.
References:
Prouty,R. (2009). A Turtle on a Leash. Retrieved from http://www.onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/a-turtle-on-a-leash.html
Kuttainen,V. (2015). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, narratives
and the making of place, Lecture 4: Power. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?course_id=_69741&content_id=_1892283_1
Flâneur, N.D. (2015) In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur
Photograph Credit:
CorrectionGuy.(2015). Retrieved from https://www.google.com.au/search?q=facebook+mapping+meme&biw=1138&bih=523&sorce=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMI16jZ_vq2xwIVo6ymCh0ougob#tb=isch&q=facebook+stalking+meme&imgrc=OVqO05qntPGY3M%3A
I agree, Our Facebook profiles create a sometimes, very detailed map of our lives.
ReplyDelete“Maps are the description of the way things are (Wood, Laiser & Abramms, 2006, p. 3).”
Or in the case of Facebook, ‘the way people are.’ Every time we update the information on our profiles we are updating a map of our lives and posting it for the hundreds of ‘friends’ we may have on our profile to see. This map may then cause people to change the way they think of us, like after seeing the photo of you in leopard pyjamas. Although it was such a long time ago it still changes the way many people see you today.
In fact I’ve noticed over the past couple of months, if my account requests me to update the information I have on my profile. For example sport teams or artists that I like. I actually go through and delete information from my profile. This is after considering the views people may form of me when they view the map I have created of my life in my profile.
Wood, D., Kaiser, W L., & Abrammas, B. (2006). Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World. Amherst, UK: New International Publications.
I agree. You can find out or share a lot of information through your posts on facebook. You can also change what you post, to create an identity. As said by Wood, D. (2001) “Every map is a purposeful selection from everything that is known, bent to the mapmaker's ends."
ReplyDeleteThis map of our lives on Facebook is an interesting, interactive social map. We can also go back and look over it ourselves later, as you said. This can allow us to use it as a personal life map too. I like how you described looking through page after page as being the very hungry caterpillar. Facebook’s structure and things like “people you may now” make it easy to click link after link and follow to other’s profiles, or ‘life maps.’
References:
Wood, D. (2001) Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to see the World. Oxford, UK: New Internationlist Publications Ltd