Real vs Virtual

🙇Real You VS Virtual You💻 

By Katelyn Gilchrist 

Have you ever stopped to think about how your online status may differ from your everyday self? Do we present ourselves online differently from who we really are? Perhaps we portray ourselves as someone we'd rather be. Or we may just act the same. How can these alternative (or unchanging) personalities affect our positioning within social maps, typically within social networks such as Vine.

Online it is quite easy to tell where you sit within the social hierarchy. Through friends counts, sub counts, likes, popular pages, verification ticks and more. Vine utilises followers, loop counts (view count) and a popular page to feature content creators and videos. All of these strategies allow Vine to identify who/what is popular and thus allow more viewers to see this already popular content. With this more-or-less free advertisement, already popular content creaters become even more viewed which hightens their status within the network. As more and more content creators become popular or noticed, others want to collaborate. These connections made through collaborating link content creators/influencers to one another. These links can be mapped to illustrate the most popular creators. Creators such as Josh Peck, King Bach, Lele Pons and the Logan brothers were highly successful and did many collaborations which would make them super connectors within this Vine network map. Although, when we compare the real with the virutal things get a bit fuzzy. Who was a real friend/collaboration and who was just an attempt to claim fame/popularity and how does their online personas and popularity compare with that of their online self? 

Not only are the content creators mappable but so are viewers. Woods explains that “every map serves a purpose" and "every map advances an interest” and this can be seen even in such a small community such as that of the vine network. You could map various different things such as which content creators/genre or video is the most viewed or what content creators/genres an individual intereacts with most (Wood, 2001, pp. 4). Vine's genre based search feature allows content creators to be easily grouped. "Genre... generate[s] and shape[s] our knowledge of the world" which is why it actively plays a great roll in how content creators and viewers can be mapped and linked into hubs or sub groups (Frow, 2013, lecture). 

Image 1: Super connectors within Networks (Shuttershock)

If I take into account my own social positioning on the real versus virtual map. At first I would bellieve that I  fail to even exist within the vine map as I never made an account or used the app, and quite often displayed my distaste for the apps existance. However through weak links such as vine compilation videos on youtube I am still interrelated within this map. Despite my so-called dislike for it in the real world, I still actively included myself within the network in the virtual world.

Frow, J. (2013). BA1002: Our space: networks, narratives, and the making of place, week 3 lecture. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/webapps/blackboard/execute/content/file?cmd=view&content_id=_2846467_1&course_id=_84764_1 

Li, R., Lu, C., Wei, H., Yu, X, J. (2015). Exploring hierachies in online social networks. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04220  

Shuttershock. (unknown). Retrieved from https://ak9.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/13707584/thumb/8.jpg?i10c=img.resize(height:160)

Wood, et, al. (2001). The multiple truths of the mappable world. Seeing through maps: Many ways to see the world (1, 12). United Kingdom: New Internationalist Plublications.