{"id":10406,"date":"2012-05-24T11:37:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-24T15:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=10406"},"modified":"2012-05-24T11:42:54","modified_gmt":"2012-05-24T15:42:54","slug":"digital-dualism-and-stories-of-the-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/05\/24\/digital-dualism-and-stories-of-the-real\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Dualism and Stories of the Real"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Image by Brad Lindert<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A couple of weeks ago, my interest was piqued by an article boasting the intriguing headline: “‘Losing yourself’ in a fictional character can affect your real life.”<\/a> Essentially, researchers at Ohio State University have evidence that suggests very strongly that people who become emotionally engaged with a character in a story are more likely to alter their behavior according to how that character behaves, even if only temporarily. This piqued my interest first and foremost as a writer of fiction because it reflected my own experience so directly: When considering the mannerisms, speech, attitude, and choices of a character, it’s not uncommon for me to find my own behavior changing slightly to reflect those considerations, especially if I’m really trying to get inside a character’s head.<\/p>\n

But then the piece piqued my interest in an entirely different way: the headline — if not the study itself — seems to be operating on the assumption that there is a distinct difference between a reader’s experience of a character in a work of fiction and the reader’s embodied experience of their own lives; in other words, that there’s a qualitative difference between the world of the imagination and the “real world”. And I’m inclined to view this assumption as flat-out incorrect.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, I think the reasons why<\/em> this assumption is incorrect have some things to say regarding the problematic assumption of digital dualism.<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In order to argue this point I need to dip into literary theory a bit; structuralist approaches to the study of stories are useful in this case because they allow for the deconstruction of the component parts of a story — which I think are relevant concepts when we consider self-narratives, where they come from and how they’re formed, and how that formation is affected by social media technologies.<\/p>\n

For structural narrative theorists, the two most basic parts of a story are the story<\/em> and the discourse, <\/em>respectively understood as the content of the narrative itself — the plot, the characters, the events that unfold — and the way in which that content is communicated — its structure, its medium (film, TV, print, hypertext), and the tools used to bring it into being. The story<\/em> is the what<\/em>, while the discourse<\/em> is the how.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is at heart a very simple idea, and even a patently self-evident one, but it’s also a powerful one in that it allows one to conceive of what happens in a story and how that story is told separately but in a way that facilitates greater understanding of just how inseparable these two elements are. You don’t have an intelligible narrative apart from discourse; stories require telling. And how<\/em> a story is told can have a dramatic effect on the content of the story itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But what does this have to do with technology and digital dualism? People here have already written extensively on how social media works to shape our perceptions of ourselves<\/a>, of others, and of the very world we inhabit — on how social media allows us to essentially “curate reality”<\/a>, cultivating an environment in which we generally see what we want to see. In the structuralist narratalogical sense, we can understand social media and related technologies as the discourse<\/em> through we tell stories<\/em> — about ourselves, about others, about everything.<\/strong> If we recognize that the discourse of a story can shape the content of the story itself, then the idea of a “data self”<\/a> — a self that is shaped through its augmentation by social media — is a deeply sensible one. Perhaps most importantly, again, one can’t separate the discourse from the story and still have something understandable; the two can be conceptualized separately but must be understood together.<\/strong> This is increasingly — and arguably always has been — true of humanity and technology.<\/p>\n

Technologies of documentation and sharing are the discourse through which we tell our stories. From this perspective, the idea of a separate “offline” life that we should somehow privilege as more real, authentic, and meaningful than what happens online makes about as much sense as the content of a story divorced from the method of its telling.<\/p>\n

I want to return to the article that initially sparked this line of thinking, because there’s one additional point that I think bears making. I would argue that one of the defining elements of social media technologies is the way in which they facilitate our natural inclination to construct narratives,<\/strong> most particularly about ourselves but about a myriad other things as well. Humans are storytelling creatures and always have been, but because of how<\/em> the discourse of social media works — and the kind of narrative construction, collection, and constant documentation that it allows for — our understandings of ourselves and the world around us are increasingly story-laden. We don’t just view our present as always a potential documented past<\/a> — we view it as a story to be told in a particular way, the content and discourse of which shapes our understanding of ourselves in the present and our imagination of ourselves in the future.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That last point is at the heart of why I think the article at the beginning of this piece was operating on a fundamentally incorrect assumption: that the world of our imaginations is somehow separate from and less authentic then our “real lives”. Our experiences of stories — our emotional investment in them, what we learn from them, why and how they change the ways in which we understand — always shape the other stories that we tell about ourselves and others.<\/strong> This isn’t new; it’s at the core of the persistence and power of myth.<\/p>\n

If we want to understand how social media affects our selves, we would do well to conceive of it and the self as an integrated whole, story and discourse in a single narrative. And if we want to understand how and why narratives matter, I think we would do well to conceive of the world of the imagination and the world external to it in similar fashion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, my interest was piqued by an article boasting the intriguing headline: “‘Losing yourself’ in a fictional character can affect your real life.” Essentially, researchers at Ohio State University have evidence that suggests very strongly that people who become emotionally engaged with a character in a story are more likely to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1760,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[12760,2324,10407,14034,10447,12856,16049,13944,732,3542],"class_list":["post-10406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-ambient-documentation","tag-augmented-reality","tag-augmented-self","tag-data-self","tag-digital-dualism","tag-narrative","tag-reality-construction","tag-self-narrative","tag-social-media","tag-storytelling"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1760"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10406"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10412,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10406\/revisions\/10412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}