Week 4 Blog 2

In this week’s lecture the focus was how we view our own story our “narrative”, or the story of others. Our lives are made up of events that have seemingly no connection or link or purpose, to explain ourselves we create a narrative. A recollection of events which we have participated in portrayed from our own perspective. Life is a series of meaningless events that we actually apply a narrative or a reality to make sense or give a purpose to our lives.

For example, on Facebook, if I attend a party and take pictures post them on Facebook. That is my perspective of the event, my perspective may include my friends and what I did on the night, however there were many other people at this party, many different events occurred and many that I would not have been involved with. I certainly would not have been the only one to post photos of the party and I might not even be friends with some of the people that were there. Is my recount of the night correct? Accurate? Complete? What constitutes a complete narrative?  Can a narrative ever be complete?

Even social networking sites such as Facebook do not complete a narrative of an event, some recollections of an event simply aren’t meant to be shared, they are kept secret.  Modern society emphasises individualism, instead of collectivism such as the narrative of Aboriginal tribes, as explained by Catherine and Ronald Berndt (1978) The Aboriginal Australians ‘Song lines were created for the purpose of retaining and sharing information, their narrative was essential to their survival’ not essential to their social status.

References

Image taken from: Here

Van Luyn, A. (2013). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, Lecture 4: Networked Narratives. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au.