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In 2006 Larry Smith, a writer and magazine editor, realized his dream to start a publication “celebrating the explosion of personal media and the personal stories that celebrate the brilliance in the ordinary” (Smith 2006b). That magazine is Smith, an online “blog-a-zine” about “you and your neighbor and about people you haven’t met yet . . . all with stories that frame our increasingly complicated world” (Smith 2006a). That focus reflects the Anglo-North American public’s apparently voracious appetite for auto/biographical narrative1 : “We just can’t get enough of one another’s lives,” Smith explains, observing the different and daily practices of self-representation taking place in print and, more variously , over telecommunication networks (2006a). Given the key role played by new technologies in promoting these narratives and the lack of interest from print publishers, Smith turned to the Internet to launch his magazine, and quickly Smith became a major site for the production and consumption of online life writing, featuring myriad auto/biographical story “projects,” including comics, videos, and written vignettes. In particular, Smith magazine is the home of SixWord Memoir, which the site describes as a “populist, participatory, inspirational, and addictive” activity with a busy community of users who have contributed “hundreds of thousands” of mini-memoirs since the site launched in November 2006 (Smith magazine 2012b).2 This project builds on the possibly apocryphal Hemingway challenge to write an entire narrative in six words (the example attributed to him: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”). Launched as a contest in collaboration with Twitter, Smith sent subscribers one six-word memoir a day, and the site—and the practice—took off (Smith magazine 2012b). The site has spawned a YouTube series, four best-selling books, a board game, and, ubiquitously , a line of T-shirts. The six-word activity has become a popular pedagogical tool (the site features one “classroom” a month) and has been adopted by 144 Life Bytes Six-Word Memoir and the Exigencies of Auto/tweetographies k L au r i e M c N e i l l churches, youth groups, and “six-word slams.” One member reports that, at her grandmother’s funeral, mourners submitted six-word memorials to celebrate her life (Qui 2011). While Smith invited some celebrity contributions to its books, the majority of memoirs are produced, as Smith imagined, by “ordinary” individuals who upload their stories on the website. Smith magazine’s Six-Word Memoir—part contest, part collective auto/biographical act, part group therapy—highlights the key role played by online technologies in the ongoing popularity of memoir. Providing users with the invitation to see their lives as the material for what it calls a “good story” (Smith 2006a) and also with the means with which to make it public, Smith traded on the sense of untapped potential, facilitated by technological change, to build a community of auto/biographers, all equally engaged by each other’s “good stories.” But it was not only Larry Smith who observed technology’s role in initiating a “golden age” of personal narrative (Smith 2006a): since 1991, when the World Wide Web made it possible to connect Internet content, millions of people have taken up digital technologies to tell their stories, in public, to potentially millions of readers, whether they are on blogs, Facebook, YouTube, or Ancestry.com. Six-Word Memoir is therefore one of thousands of websites in Anglo-North American culture, and particularly the United States, that responds to and builds social demand for what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson call “everyday autobiography” (Smith and Watson 1996, 3). The popularity of online auto/biography, in its myriad forms, suggests that the Internet is serving and creating a shared sense that these interactive representations are how we make meaning of our lives. As one instance of this culture, Six-Word Memoir illustrates the unique ways that cyberspace is shaping (and is shaped by) the genres of life narrative, including memoir. Six-Word Memoir is an instance of the identity technologies the Internet enables. These technologies include the hardware and software that users engage to produce and consume lives online, and this chapter considers the influential role these devices play in changing online auto/biography. But identity technologies also include the cultural and institutional apparatuses that can give shape to a desire to make and share stories, and the ways that users imagine making them. Such “technologies of self” (Foucault 1988) show online auto/ biographers reinscribing very traditional social functions that the...

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