Virtually Me

S Smith, J Watson - Identity technologies: Constructing the self …, 2014 - books.google.com
S Smith, J Watson
Identity technologies: Constructing the self online, 2014books.google.com
Opportunities for composing, assembling, and networking lives have expanded
exponentially since the advent of Web 2.0. The sites and software of digital media provide
occasions for young people to narrate moments in coming of age; for families to track and
narrate their genealogical histories; for people seeking friends and lovers or those with
similar hobbies to make connections; for political activists to organize around movements
and causes. These everyday sites of self-presentation appear to be categorically different …
Opportunities for composing, assembling, and networking lives have expanded exponentially since the advent of Web 2.0. The sites and software of digital media provide occasions for young people to narrate moments in coming of age; for families to track and narrate their genealogical histories; for people seeking friends and lovers or those with similar hobbies to make connections; for political activists to organize around movements and causes. These everyday sites of self-presentation appear to be categorically different from what is understood as traditional life writing, be it published autobiography, memoir, or confession. And yet, as Nancy Baym (2006) observes,“online spaces are constructed and the activities that people do online are intimately interwoven with the construction of the offline world and the activities and structures in which we participate, whether we are using the Internet or not”(86, qtd in Gray 2009, 1168). Thus, online lives exist in complicated relationship to offline lives and to what has been termed the “outernet”(Nakamura 2008, 1676). And “electronic persons” have multiple connections to “proximate individuals,” as J. Schmitz (1997) has observed (qtd in Kennedy 2006, 4). For these reasons, the analytical frames and theoretical positions of scholarship on life writing can provide helpful concepts and categories for thinking about the proliferation of online lives in varied media and across a wide range of sites. Our contribution to understanding subjectivity and identities online, as well as the modes and media mobilized to present and perform lives, is this toolkit, organized alphabetically through rubrics derived from the framework we developed in Reading Autobiography (Smith and Watson 2010). 1 Studying the presentation of online lives makes clear that both the self and its presentation are only apparently autonomous, as many life narrative theorists, as well as media theorists, argue. In fact, online lives are fundamentally relational or refracted
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