Multimodal, multiplex, multispatial: A network model of the self
Published online on October 07, 2015
Abstract
Contemporary culture finds human experience spread across various digital and physical spaces. Although many scholars embrace derivative perspectives of a distributed self—dramaturgical, multiphrenic, networked—these notions are seldom engaged as empirically testable theories. This article proposes a theoretical model to foster such empirical examination, in which the "self" is not engaged as a node in broader social networks, but taken as a network itself. That is, the self is reframed as a subjectively experienced network of identities that are, themselves, complex assemblages of many different kinds of objects. In this way, the binaries of me/not-me, human/nonhuman, material/immaterial, and digital/physical are unraveled in favor of more precisely identified interrelated agents giving rise to the Self across digital and physical contexts.