Ceci n’est pas reality

                                                             (Image 1: Katcher, 2011)

As Ferdinand de Saussure argued, this is not a pipe but merely an illustration of a pipe (Van Luyn, 2013). Nor is one’s identity on the social network ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed (McNeill, 2012). In the virtual reality of the cyber world, nothing is a single, measurable entity. Rather the cyber world is not natural and knowable, neither is its author, a concept early humanist philosophy cannot solely explain. This argument is further developed elsewhere (Van Luyn, 2013), that in the virtual network you are not the only individual constructing your identity but rather the software, as McNeill (2012) highlights, and other people are co-producing your online-self. Thus we enter the realm of cyber-reality.

Similarly to the song-lines of Indigenous Australians, online users today are inter-connected by the constant sharing of narratives and information that map out the vast and almost inhabitable cyber landscape not unlike Australia was to its first inhabitants (Chatwin, 1987). For instance, when navigating the social network site tumblr, one cannot progress through the site without sharing and re-sharing information with other users. As the song-line enabled Aboriginals to sing things into meaning such as The Dreaming, one can except the networked narratives or multiple tumblr blogs as a ‘complex of meanings’ for understanding one’s on-line self. Just as white man ‘cannot easily, in the mobility of modern life, grasp... the vast intuitions... at the heart of Aboriginal ontology’(Stanner, 1979), the same type of thought cannot be applied when trying to understand the ontology of the cyborg.

 The importance of agency and community within Aboriginal people is equally important in my social network on tumblr. When initially making my profile I indicated what types of blogs I wished to follow: art, music, animals and humour. The tumblr software became my ‘shadow’ biographer by ‘suggesting’ what blogs to follow, those that were quite conservative in regards to the themes I suggested (no nudity in the art or heavy metal music). Clearly the blogs or narratives viewed as more acceptable than others were endorsed here (Van Luyn, 2013). Despite this, one gains empowerment by engaging in the site regularly by searching, locating and re-blogging the information I, the user, like. In this way, tumblr allows ‘mash-ups, re-[blogs] and collaborations’ by active users to be more than consumers (Van Luyn, 2013). To use Axel Burns terminology, tumblr users become ‘produsers’ (McNeill, 2012).  

Chatwin, B. (1987). Chapter 3, in Songlines (pp.11-15). London, England: Johnathan Cape.

Katcher, J. (2011). The Discerning Brute. Retrieved from:

              http://www.thediscerningbrute.com/2011/04/15/the-treachery-of-images/

McNeill, L. (2012). There is no “I” in network: Social networking sites and post-human auto-biography. In Biograohy, 35(1), 101-118.

Stanner, W.E.H. (1979). The dreaming (1953), in White man got no dreaming: Essays 1938-1973 (pp.23-30). Canberra, Australia: Australian National University Press.

Van Luyn, A. (2013). Week 4 Lecture Notes.