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In a 2007 PMLA article addressing “the changing profession,” Nancy K. Miller (2007) suggests that “[a]utobiography may emerge as a master form in the twenty-first century” (545). Recognizing both the expansion and explosion of popular forms of published autobiography, and the strength and durability of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have called “the memoir boom” (Smith and Watson 2010, 127), Miller points to the rich variety of texts and contexts animating autobiographical production and consumption, as well as to the necessity of promoting a similar richness in scholarly approach. She happily concludes that, in the face of such variety and plenitude, “[a]cademics have risen to the occasion with refreshing inventiveness” (Miller 2007, 546). Since that publication, popular Internet life writing forms—among them blogs, vlogs, and social network sites—have begun to demand a similar inventiveness. Such invention proceeds in fits and starts, but the challenges presented by digital life writing are arguably more sweeping and various than those uncovered by the graphic memoirs and print “autobiofictionalography” Miller considers in her survey. Digital life writing maps a realm with no gatekeepers, editors, or canons, producing texts to excess on a scale of production and publication that completely overwhelms the boutique reading practices of literary scholarship. Digital life writing develops normative writing and reading practices that shift with each software upgrade or each new cultural meme. Digital life writing troubles the hard-won notion of the artfulness of auto/biographical texts as the basis for their appropriateness as objects of scholarly attention. Digital life writing, in fact, poses a kind of limit case of autobiographical theory and criticism, at once terrifying and compelling in its sheer scale and its wide-open popular production. How can we understand the Facebook status update? This is a deceptively modest question, one that will generate further pointed inquiries into digital life 112 Facebook and Coaxed Affordances k A i m é e M o r r i s o n writing practices in all their variety. Facebook offers both fertile ground and a terrible problem to auto/biography scholars. That the service cries out for autobiographical analysis seems beyond doubt. That more than 1 billion people are enrolled in the network, with more than half of them accessing Facebook daily, renders that analysis as urgent as it is important (Facebook 2012). But fundamental questions confront the analyst, questions that are complicated to formulate , let alone answer: What are the ethics of the interpolation of the stories and voices of others into a user’s digital life narrative? What to make of the use of photographs? What social pressures are at play in determining what is written on the site and who can see it? These are serious questions, but insofar as they pertain to the relationality of identity, the ethics of life storytelling, or the role of visual material in autographic narratives, auto/biography studies is well enough equipped already to handle them. But what if, as Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti suggest, social network sites present “auto-assemblages” rather than authored texts as such (Whitlock and Poletti 2008, xiv)? Whitlock and Poletti describe these auto-assemblages as “the result of ongoing selection and appropriation of content across several modes brought together into a constellation for the purpose of self-representation or life narrative” (xv).1 To account for the “auto” of this “assemblage” would be to acknowledge the necessity of dealing with the technological characteristics of digital media. And so the fact of Facebook poses us yet more questions, perhaps even thornier for auto/biography scholars to address and for which less groundwork has been laid. We must begin to consider the style sheets that organize display of user-generated materials; the input prompts that coax and restrict user action by turns; the ever-shifting privacy settings that dramatically and continually reset the boundaries between personal narrative and public dissemination; and the automated, algorithm-driven recitation of users’ actions across their social graphs. Each shapes the resulting digital life writing “text” as much as do the more traditional authorial practices of a typing subject deliberately arranging her life into a story. Whitlock and Poletti (2008) assert that scholars must consider “how the functionality of the software, in conjunction with the cultures of usage . . . , shape the production of specific autographic performances” (xvi). One way to proceed, they note, is by “asking precise questions about software” (xvi). To do just this, the path forward must be mapped by both auto/biography and new...

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