We are closely observing a digital technological revolution. The story of our life is incomplete without our digital side.  Everything we encounter our expressions, emotions, thoughts, careers, and relationships have a digital linkage beyond our physical reality. The digital world certainly has become our second self, having a strong and ardent link with the virtual world (Turkle). The way computers and digital devices have influenced human culture has changed the traditional patterns, behaviours and manners of societies. With the impact of digital technology on the self whether material, spiritual, or social, the ideology of self in the form of “I” has altogether changed (Tonks). The change in the patterns of self, due to digital indulgence can be apprehended by making ethnographic research, here individuals, communities and groups in the digital space become important from where the data is collected.

Digital auto-ethnography helps to trace the patterns of behaviour, and emotional, social and personal life experiences as they are connected with digital machines, gadgets and devices of an individual who is living in a digital technological culture. Due to digitization, the change in the cultural patterns with the technologies makes us rethink our cultural and social values and increases our level of acceptance of the changing cultural dimensions (Hine).  Digital auto-ethnography centres around the calculation of our relationship with digital devices and our day-to-day activities.  The idea that how the virtual has become a real and a permanent part of ourselves has affected our cultural practices in an era of hyperreality and simulacra also become a foundational point in digital ethnographic studies. We are living in images, driven by images and our emotional responses are also stimulated by images, which Baudrillard calls simulacra. The study of the self is incomplete without conducting ethnographic research on the digital self. 
 
Keywords: Auto-Ethnography, Digital self, Simulacra, Virtual Self, Second Self
 
Digital autoethnography is a method to explore the ways of cultural patterns we have been experiencing in life while living in a digital world. Just like the idea of globalization our world has become a global village and we are influenced by happening around another corner. People take a personal interest in the regime change in a country and the global effects on the economic market. Likewise, digital autoethnography is a method of narrating our personal stories and the importance of digitization in our lives and our global connectivity. It is a method of studying the self and our relationship with popular culture and how it is transforming our identities and our conception of reality (Atay). Atay talks about lived experiences such as loss, grief, distant relationships, immigration, and oppressive culture, from larger spectrums of socioeconomic to the narrow layers of personal experiences all have been greatly influenced by digital and cyberspace.
 
In a postmodern world, reality has transformed its shape and we are confronted with many other forms of representation which call themselves to be real such as virtual reality, augmented reality, physical reality, social reality and many more. Baudrillard had called that whatever we see is not real but a copy of a copy and so is hyperreality (Baudrillard). This idea is very visibly connected with our digital self. What we present ourselves, and which particular aspect we show to the world through social media or other digital platforms would not be an accurate depiction of who we are. Our use of the digital world is also somewhat linked with imitating and copying trending music, shopping, and video content, people are always mimicking the content by considering it trending, whether they are dialogues or behavioural patterns. Such forms of explorations of real and unique experiences are also discussed in digital autoethnography. The experience of a recent incident by a famous TikTok having a fan following of eleven million, set fire to the Margalla hills just to produce imitated content on a song having lyrics “wherever I go I put fire” raises serious concerns and it had a very deep effect on the nation’s consciousness ( Yousafzai). On one level environmentalists were concerned about this event and on the other side, it raises serious trouble about the level of absurdity to gain popularity on the digital platform and to produce unique content which is still simulacra and is shared extensively on digital spaces.
Spaces also have a unique effect on us. Within the digital world, we experience unique cyber spacing, these are the platforms on which our digital performances are based and they are the creator or initiators of a diverse digital culture. Cyberspace is so magnetic that all other fields, ideas, and linkages converge themselves into it. No sphere in our lives is left alone without being affected by the digital world. Thus, digital spaces have overpowered us.  Lefebvre has talked about the power of space as:
The space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action … in addition to being a means of production, it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power (Lefebvre, and Nicholson-Smith).
 
Cyberspace develops powerful cyberculture which in turn is a representation of greater digital ecology. We as individuals take influence from and get triggered by cultural trends and patterns.  Cyberspace forms a complex space of web; one is almost lost in a whole web of endless linkages. To understand what cyberspace is, Bell argues we have to live and experience it share stories and lend an ear to others  (Bell). The cyber world is so ingrained in us that we fear getting disconnected from it. One relatable example of it is as soon as there is some electricity breakage a deep sense of loss is felt due to internet disconnection. Young old, and children feel immense stress and anxiety as if a part of themselves has gone missing.

Digital autoethnography brings to light some of the most intricate subtle nuances of cyberculture and its effects on us. We are greatly affected by a culture which we unknowingly have internalised and where the idea of interpellation occurs. My digital shopping is a comprehensively detailed list of products. I remember my father wanted to open up a business late in the year 2000. He wanted to import tea from Kenya and it was my first interaction with a company for buying a product using the online medium. We ordered the tea from Kenya and after almost fifteen days we received the package. I was pretty excited to open it and relish the beautiful aroma of the tea. I relate this experience to my easy accessibility and connectivity to a remote country by simply communicating via email.  My later experiences affected me what Althusser calls the process of interpellation, a process of passively accepting what is being projected to you. By signing in through a female id on Facebook, I experienced multiple brands of clothing and beauty products and unconsciously I always dreamt of purchasing them and using the products. Advertisements create a lack, we usually do not need things but feel an immense lack of not having them. Whenever I scrolled through the advertisements, they always created a lack in me because I did not have those products and I thought that my beauty would be incomplete without using the products.  I started to order serums, makeup kits, clothing and various other products online because whenever I scroll down my social media pages, I encounter these advertisements. Moreover, shopping online has become a whole lot easier for me than going physical shopping in search of the relevant product. Online shopping becomes my necessity and going for physical shopping becomes a rather mundane task and less luxurious.  We have internalized the internet and digitization, and we have connected to it by considering that the best option in our life is the internet which not only suggests but also provides us easy accessibility for purchasing and buying. We also try to readily believe that our sense of beauty is incomplete without following the latest fashion trends, buying the makeup and applying it as per the tutorial and in the end using a Snapchat camera. According to Althusser we unknowingly tend to think of ourselves according to what is represented to us. Our sense perception is deeply affected by what is shown to us. Now, I believe in the power of the internet as it is a magnanimous tool to influence sales and business and is used for building up a consumer society.

My interaction with social media has been profound in my life because it was from here that I got started to build connections with a range of different people with otherwise I would not have ever talked. I always have social anxiety about meeting people and talking to them in person. Even at the arrival of guests at home, I was extremely shy to confront them, and give them time or talk to them. Somehow, I found myself quite expressive in the virtual world. The choice of words to talk within the virtual world is more controlled with less social and emotional anxiety, this is relatable as far as my case is concerned. If I would say my virtual life story is very deeply ingrained in my personality, it would not be wrong. It has completely changed the way I take up life, people, events and much more. There are a few incidents that have become a permanent part of myself and they are linked with my digital self I would say these virtual events have completely transformed me.
 
            It was early in 2018 that I wanted to appear in a competitive exam. I wanted to get the best guidance for this. Going directly to the academies was difficult for me as I had a very tight schedule with my job and was already at the finishing line of my MPhil thesis. I wanted to have a guide that would be easily available to me. Then on Facebook, I found a group which was run by an officer of a high rank from the foreign services group. I quickly realized that I had landed on the right platform. Almost every day he made an interactive session on meditation, telling us in his groups how to meditate, and how to cope with anxiety, stress and problems related to youth. Soon this man started to build up a team and team leaders on each subject and encourage all people of their capabilities and the youth was ready to sell their services for free. I was also encouraged to teach a subject I was learning about and still have little knowledge of. His policy was to teach whatever you learn and to create a chain of leaders. Soon his Facebook groups were flooded with a flock of students, teachers cum students, and student leaders and all were promoting his groups for free. They were providing free services and were taking free services. And I also become a permanent faculty member always ready to deliver a class and postpone any of my family activities for it. The whole structure for the online academy was built on the promise that we were soon going to be officers as we were under the mentorship of an already successful officer. Soon after when the virtual academy was established our mentor asked us to invest an amount for the academy’s office. Now at this moment, many of us were already blindly pouring down money or doing anything that our mentor was saying to them, some other people resisted, but somehow unemployed youth started to send this man money in the hope of a bright future. He also became commanding asking for free services from us and to invest in us to run his virtual academy and named it the Self-actualization Foundation (SAF). He opened his head office in Islamabad and also gave its charge to a girl who was also near kin to him. Soon he started to manipulate the youth with atheistic lessons,  blunt sexual advice on Facebook posts on Valentine’s Day and a meditation marathon. He also pressured the so-called teacher’s faculty to daily share content and scheduling of classes. I delivered the whole lecture series on the subject of Gender Studies. At first, I was excited that I was doing a great thing but I soon realized that I had turned out of the path. I came to join these virtual classes to get prepared and to become competent enough to get through the competitive exams. There were so many of his students who were in the faculty and as soon as they realized his motive they started to leave him, as they found no prospect for what they had come for. Instead, they did not fall prey to a person who had been manipulating them thoroughly and completely.  Soon I became perplexed, I badly performed in the exams as my preparation was incomplete for other subjects and then I wanted to quit the groups. I exited myself from the WhatsApp groups and the Facebook groups also. The mentor tried to contact the persons who had been running his groups he also contacted me on WhatsApp and Facebook but I did not respond. His virtual academy taught me a good lesson about not blindly following anyone.

Cyberspace is also a potential place to meet people of one’s thought pattern. Though I learned a lot from my last experience and one thing I learned was it is very easy to connect with virtual communities. There was a time back then in 2020 when I was reading books that were highly theoretical and were classical such as Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In order to see the interest of other people in this book, I started searching for what people have written about the book on their Facebook posts. Then I came across a post by a professor about his colleague who had died recently and his colleague was very impressed by the book. I quickly viewed the profile of the professor he belonged to some university in Canada, I sent a friend’s request to him and he sent a message about whether I knew him. I simply replied, “No”, and then gave him a little detail about my search I wrote to him “I was searching for the book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and I passed through your comment on it, that your friend who recently died was very much impressed by the book, and somehow, I thought to connect to you.” It was a very interesting talk with him and he was a retired professor from the University of Newfoundland. He soon started to send long emails with complex intellectual debates and his views on socio-economic theories and current happenings. I also tried very hard to compete with his level of intelligence. Every time I  had to read some books then I discussed with him my views and also tried to link them to international and global socio-political happenings. We still email and discuss ideas and theories and the happenings around the world. It is always very pleasant to listen to him about his reading and intellectual activities.
People with professions such as writers, scholars and analysts inspire me to build my career like them. I remain more on Facebook than on other social media. Facebook for me was the platform for endless opportunities. I started to imagine cyberspace as a ground on which you can connect with people and use networking to share your content. I wanted to write something and get a good intellectual audience around me. I soon started expressing my thoughts on different current issues, and there I happened to come across a person who was a national and international analyst on Petroleum prices. He corrected me in one of my analysis posts on some international issues. I searched for the person and got to know he had been a writer in various local and international magazines, and press and also come on channels. I was impressed as the person was quite famous. I contacted the person and asked him to guide me to publish my article. He was a generous person with very good social skills, not only he guide me but also encouraged me to write and express as much as I could. I then wrote an article, it got published and to my surprise, I was admired by so many people. It was a national reputable newspaper and I got featured. He also told me to write and post on every social media, especially LinkedIn because this is one of the best and most effective ways to connect with the most professional people. 
A year back, I was admitted to a university as a graduate student. It opened a whole new intellectual ground to discover and explore new avenues of thinking. We were exploring multiple dimensions of reality in our Digital Humanities class. The debate of real in the age where we find Simulacra everywhere kept us engaged in ideas of what is real. The idea of reality which got started with Plato and was touched upon by almost all great philosophers is still going on, it has now become more complex in the postmodern world. We are now living in a world of multiple dimensions, known as parallel worlds. These parallel worlds exist at the same time. During one of the classes of digital humanities, we experienced and theorised how it is to experience multiple dimensions. Our teacher and all the students were sitting in the same room and tried to connect digitally via Google document. We strive to write and we were connected to one document, virtually we were on the same page able to recreate, change or suggest each one’s words, letters, changes in the layout, colour and much more. To theorize it as it was our virtual reality which was presented in the online platforms. And this parallel world is what we experience everywhere. Our presence in this real world is just one dimension of reality, we are at the same time present in another world which is virtual in this age of digital technology. Our one like on a post which we make on a computer in our homes or at one location through our mobile is received to some other place of the world by some other computer. It is just like we can control the events in other places while sitting somewhere else. One application TeamViewer, Which I once used for remote control access to some other computer. One day my brother wanted to access a file which was present on a desktop at home but he was sitting in his workplace. He simply asked me to connect to TeamViewer at my home computer and he also connected to TeamViewer software at his place. He was then able to remotely control the desktop computer completely which was physically present at home. It just revolutionized my mind about the remote control. The physical activities happening at one place can be virtually controlled by sitting at some other place. 
No doubt I enjoy eating cookies but  I had no experience of it in the digital world. Soon I get to discover that cookies are basically to watch over the user’s activities and to find his preferences and interests. The idea of creating a file of users and making surveillance of the users After then have been experiencing cookies all around me. My parents have been cookies to me, the places I go they have cookies and very interestingly cookies at the virtual sites provoke my deep sense of uncomfortableness. Though the websites ask permission for setting a cookie many of them would not allow serving without our accepting their cookie and this troubles me a lot. In my syllabus on Digital Humanities, I had been watching futuristic movies the season Black Mirror and I also got the idea of human cookies that are implanted into the human bodies. The episode The Entire History of You is the best example of the implantation of grain technology that uses the function of cookies by seeing and recording all the past historical events which are connected with our sensory perception. However, the data in the episode was highly accurate, images and videos can be zoomed in and out and listened to carefully and more accurately than what is simply achieved by our sensory data. Now, this idea is being worked upon by biotechnologists and I happened to arrive at a website which was offering cookie implantation into the human body. Biohax company is developing technologies that can be implanted under the skin. They claim to have better monitoring of health issues,  blood pressure, our preferences of choices, locations, meeting with people and a lot of other things. However, experts are also worried that this technology can harm us and can create serious privacy issues. The cookie is planted somewhere under the skin of the thumb and is the size of rice. It is an idea related to IoT where physical devices are connected to the internet and all data is stored in the cloud. It then means that our human body would function as a thing and all our activities would have a cloud backup (Banafa). Looking the other way this technology can also be used to generate specific impulsive signals to operate the human body or to develop changes and it raises ethical concerns.
The Internet is using biopower in the form of fan following or subscribers and activities such as liking, sharing and commenting. Foucault talks in The History of Sexuality about the power in all bodies and how all types of institutions utilize these powers. There is an immense debate on the manipulative use of the internet by its users. We as users are highly uncritical because of the interactive manipulation of the internet. Recent research which I went through on a news blog was on the engaging behaviour of Facebook, that it stimulates particular forms of emotional triggers and only shows a controlled set of reality and watching the news and other media is not without consequences (March).  I have been watching the issues of privacy and biased media coverage from a business point of view. My mother is a keen viewer of TikTok videos, as they are short and quick in conveying messages, My attention span has also been incredibly reduced to one minute, the content should be very engaging and interest the users to help the users to keep them watching. Whenever I sit down to work offline I quickly feel anxiety, as offline work is less interactive, especially reading a book, which has become extremely boring as digital media has weakened our imaginative power by showing us a lot of content and we have become extremely passive.
Once I was reading Exit West and there were a few instances which have a connection with digital technology. Mohsin Hamid in his interview on a TV channel talked about magical realism which for him in this real world is technology. The imagery in the book of entering into a dark door and exiting into another country flashbacks me of my futuristic imagination during my engineering studies. A door often flashes to my mind which can be used to reach any destination. I might have grabbed this idea from my reading fictional books and watching sci-fi movies but this imagery always had a powerful impact on me.  Something of a sort of ideological state apparatus, in which individuals of society started to identify themselves with whatever belief system is presented to them, especially through media. The idea which came to my mind I soon found was flooded everywhere else in media and I also found that it was somewhat practically happening through the medium of the Internet of Things. There is hardware operated through the internet and there is a two-way communication running. Like in drone technology. Though unlike physically entering another place a person can use drone technology to visit new places and use drones for military and surveillance. Through drone technology, one can enter and experience the world in a new way. Through a GPS system, one can see and visit virtually any place in the world. Though we are unable to transfer our whole body into another place, as seen in the Harry Potter movies, maybe one day this technology will be possible because we are successful in the manifestation of the idea virtually. Our online meeting platforms, like Google Meetings, Zoom, video and call conferencing etc, have helped us to virtually connect from anywhere around the world.
The shift in linguistic patterns has also become prominent in this digital age. Certain computer terminologies are now linked with our brain functions. Our brain functioning and computer functioning have similar jargon. I quite often blame my mind for dysfunction because of its slow responses and instead try to rely on the fastest medium in order to have some fast responses. I also usually used to say that my mind is in the processing of data from memory as if there is some overburdening of memory problem. Computers and brains are often linked and they have many similar functionalities. We also used to tease our friend who remained at the top by calling her theta as she has the best memory responses. Our communication has changed with text messages also. Chatting software has changed not only our text-writing styles but also our spoken language patterns. In my early use of a computer when we had a new internet connection and I had the freedom to search and browse the web, I came across a local website which provides services for chatting. Within the chat room not only one can chat with the whole group of the room but also have personal chats with people of different localities and cultures. Then I came upon whole new terminology of abbreviated words such as LOL for lots of laughs, 2nite for Tonight, BTW for By the Way, and DM for Direct message etc.
Every individual has their own unique story of their digital life. There are multiple events occurring around the cyber world. A unique physical life along with a unique digital life. Identities can be changed online, there are online communities, criminal people are using digital spaces for crime, humanitarians for flourishing humanness, and everything has reached a digital status whether an individual, government or giant companies for business. We are no longer identifiable for our physical living our digital life has its potency. Young in her book The Virtual Self says how our uploading of daily activities has become like a ritual performance and Facebook and other social media sites make a digital recording, she makes a positive note that all these recordings help us to make better decisions as AI helps us to decide according to our behaviour and mood patterns and probabilities of events. Living in a digital world also provides endless possibilities in terms of relationships, businesses, counselling, meetings, and gaming, and it has other endless extensions in the form of the Internet of Things. My living in this digital technological revolution has made me think of a changed pattern in our living and lifestyle. Our traditional modes of life are now an old story. My digital self is as much important to me as my physical self and so I am experiencing multiple lives. I can meet a lot of people of different interest backgrounds, my education has become more digital, and the official duties in jobs are reported digitally. Shopping and business have gone virtual. Our new generation is amassed in the gaming industry. Now I think that we all are capsized into the industry of the digital world where unknowingly we are immersed in ideologies that we are interpellated by the hegemonies, we are being directed to a world which is controlling us digitally and physically.