AustLit

'When future researchers look back on this generation seeking to understand our culture and society, the internet will be a rich source of archival study. We as a culture have begun to digitise not only our records and our history, but also ourselves. Contemporary internet users construct digital ‘bodies’ through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram –performing their personalities in order to participate in the online culture – while tracking bots and cookies monitor our use of the online space in order to predict which advertisements will be most effective. It is through this combination of deliberate construction and the (somewhat neutral) reflections of man-made, coded interpreters that our online ‘selves’ form. The purpose of this creative work is to explore identity-constructing practices in the online space, to reflect on the ways that the online archive can be read, and to develop an experimental non-fiction work using the internet as a base medium. The work takes the form of a travel memoir, told through a combination of my social media outputs and internet history between November 18, 2015, and March 1, 2016. I have selectively compiled posts and archived pages in order to produce what I consider to be an authentic representation of my experience, constructing a narrative of myself born from my deliberate social media posts and my internet history of that time, which gives the reader a glimpse into my mental state while I was travelling.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.