Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
The Creative Manipulation of Time Through
Digital Personal Narratives
MarĂ­a T. Soto-Sanfi el
5.1
Introduction
Digitalization increases people's possibilities for creating and publishing a variety
of narratives about their own lives. Think of people uploading their childhood pho-
tos in Facebook or writing their opinions or stories on a blog as an example. These
digital narratives refl ect the narrators' notions about their identities and circum-
stances in different timeframes (present, past and future). They can also come to
infl uence others and make them alter their own perceptions. We believe that these
narrators also more or less deliberately wish to use their narration to modify the
times of the actual experience (those of what is narrated and those of what is lived).
We consider that people who narrate about their own lives more or less consciously
see themselves as creative products, for whom it is a challenge to innovate regarding
notions established in times gone by, in the present and in the processing of narra-
tives in the future. All of this, as the reader might imagine, involves innumerable
creative and persuasive possibilities. In fact, digitalization, which allows for the
creative manipulation, storage and dissemination of individual narratives, is a pow-
erful tool for the creation of discourses about the future, the present and, most of all,
the past.
Before continuing, we shall further exemplify the above through three typical
situations in which indications can already be found of how modern-day narrators,
more than ever, try to alter the perception that they, and others, have of their identity
through the manipulation of their represented past and in order to achieve an imag-
ined projection of their future. Modern-day narrators, much more than in other
times, have access to tools that give them enormous capacities to modify the time-
frame of the narration and the experience of receiving their narratives. These
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