Extract

Before the rise of social networks and the pervasiveness of smart phones, thinking on how everyday life would be if we were to live our lives in the “vast, invisible, interconnected infrastructure” of the internet, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus posed a question: “will it indeed make our lives better? What would be gained and what if anything, would be lost if we were to take leave of our situated bodies in exchange for ubiquitous telepresence in cyberspace?”1 Fifteen years later, our ubiquitous telepresence in cyberspace is no longer a thought experiment but a reality. With approximately one billion active daily users on Facebook, three hundred million on twitter and one hundred million on Instagram, it is not farfetched to say that our telepresence in cyberspace by way of social networks has become an integral part of people’s everyday lives.

This phenomenon raises numerous questions about the effects this has on people’s day-to-day lives. Namely, how has self-understanding been affected by social networks? How does the self relate to its virtual online counterpart? Following Dreyfus, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger I hope to shed some light on these questions.

For Kierkegaard, the self is a relation that relates itself to itself. In other words, my understanding of who I am is directly dependent upon the stand I take on being that self. This stand however, is not a reflective, detached, or rational interpretation of who I am, but rather an active stance on the factical part of...