{"id":954,"date":"2014-10-07T14:44:51","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T06:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tembusu.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/?p=954"},"modified":"2025-09-25T17:09:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T09:09:54","slug":"life-on-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/2014\/10\/life-on-the-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Life On (the) Line"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So far, attending the first leg of the <i>Living and Dying in the Internet Age<\/i> junior seminar has involved taking simultaneously commonplace and yet recognisably complex terms like <i>human<\/i> and <i>communication<\/i> and throwing it through a (digital) whirlpool to see what lies at the heart of the terms in the context of the Internet age.<\/p>\n<p>The human, now \u201cdigitally distributed across text messages, Web pages, social networking sites, blog comments, and so on\u201d<a title=\"\" href=\"file:\/\/\/C:\/Users\/A0103427\/AppData\/Local\/Microsoft\/Windows\/Temporary%20Internet%20Files\/Content.Outlook\/2Z5XCD6C\/Life%20On%20(the)%20Line%20(2).docx#_ftn1\">[1]<\/a>, is introduced as a hybridised figure taking on \u201cmultiple presences\u201d in the class, yet possessing individuality. It is not easy to grasp the idea that a human can be here or there and yet also everywhere all at once \u2013 but that is exactly the image of the human that has been constructed by the possibilities of the Internet, simultaneously idiosyncratic and generalised. We had also discussed the obvious yet insidious idea of the malleability of our identities online \u2013 most prominently through images. With online communication being very much a visual affair, it seems all the more important that we create first impressions that idealise ourselves \u2013 who wants a bad image to last forever anyway?<\/p>\n<p>This brings me to the topic to the idea of immortality, though not of the person (to me, even if we managed to upload our entire bodies online, it wouldn\u2019t manage to encapsulate the visceral essence of our selves) but of our data. I had begun the module wondering whether the Internet could be generous enough to embrace the evolving human identity (since after all, I\u2019m no longer the same as I was when I was 12, but any data from the time still exists) and now nearly halfway through it all, I find myself leaning towards the idea of a <i>static<\/i> immortality \u2013 much like in a photograph, a frozen moment in time. As Ansel Adams puts it: \u201cThese people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago.\u201d If that is the effect of photographic prints, I wonder then how much more everlasting our digital imprints would be.<\/p>\n<div><br clear=\"all\" \/><\/p>\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" \/>\n<div>\n<p><a title=\"\" href=\"file:\/\/\/C:\/Users\/A0103427\/AppData\/Local\/Microsoft\/Windows\/Temporary%20Internet%20Files\/Content.Outlook\/2Z5XCD6C\/Life%20On%20(the)%20Line%20(2).docx#_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a> Graham, Connor, Gibbs, Martin and Aceti, Lanfranco (eds.). \u201cDeath, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies and Data,\u201d\u00a0<em>The Information Society<\/em>\u00a029, 3, (2013, 134).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vanessa reflects on her experience in her Junior Seminar, Living and Dying in an Internet Age, thus far. What is &#8220;the human&#8221; in the context of the web? Are we truly here, there or everywhere?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","publication_type-op-ed","theme-media","scope-others","flavour-contemplative"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":958,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions\/958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}