Thursday, July 5, 2018

13. The Anchor


From a teacher’s lecture (Social Media Usage, Paper I – Principles of Profiles)

“There is a common misconception to describe a profile as a reflection of the self.  Now, I am seeing the lot of you sitting right in front of me in this room with as much clarity as my glasses provide…”

(a bit of a pause to allow small laughter)

“…but I will not be able to see you even with a quarter of that clarity when I look into your profiles. It will show a part of you, hide some other part and conjure another one out of thin air. That is not what you would call a reflection. Facebook, you see, is a bad mirror.”

(Some laughter)

“So, what do profiles do? They spread our existence beyond our four walls. Profiles are larger than the persons they are attached to. They define us in the cyber world, which – thanks to social networking - has become almost synonymous to the real world.

And what are we, then? We are the cores around which our profiles are made. What core, you ask? The fundamental biological core. This biological core functions as an anchor and keeps the virtual profile connected to the material world, causing an overlap of the cyber and the real. Fake profiles lack this anchor and they are the true citizens of the cyber world.”

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