Opportunities to compose, assemble, and network our lives have expanded exponentially since the advent of Web 2.0, in ways that challenge our understanding of the practices of self-representation.
In online venues, unlike traditional life-writing such as autobiography or memoir, the self-referential subject is both “creator” and “user.” The lives that people present online are relational and interactive, co-constructed, and linked to others—family, friends, employers, causes, and affiliations. Users may profess attachments not only to family and community but to media personages, consumer products, and works of art or music linked to online resources such as YouTube videos or Pinterest images.
Online lives may be routed through protocol-driven sites with established formats, such as Facebook, or user-authored sites, such as blogs and personal websites, that encourage interactivity. Moreover, online lives often compete for attention with multiple features, hidden or visible (such as “likes”), stable or fluctuating (such as pop-ups), that surround user content.
To better understand how self-presentation is changing through digital reconfiguration, we have developed a “toolbox” of 15 analytical concepts. They are drawn from our work in the study of life narrative, including our book Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Here we mention five of those concepts, aimed at helping people understand changing ideas about self, memory, and life itself:
Interpreting digital archives. Online sites gather, authorize, and conserve present and past versions of self that document a person’s life, habits, and desires. Websites and hyperlinks enable users to assemble, or distribute into databases, a multimedia storehouse of life’s hallmarks. But, while all archives require assembly and curation, digital archives differ from their print counterparts because the categories of information storage are leveled, conferring the same magnitude and significance on the incidental and the characteristic. Digital archives storing fragments of a “life” are also vulnerable, threatened when code breaks down or platforms become obsolescent. And self-curators cannot control their digital afterlife; for example, platforms such as Tumblr can be used to import parts of their lives into others’ self-archives.
Evaluating claims of authenticity. The availability of multiple sites for self-presentation promises seemingly endless opportunities to convey an “authentic” self through acts of intimate sharing in virtual environments, such as Twitter or WeChat. Although the claim to authenticity promises unmediated access to some “essence” or “truth,” virtual environments only underscore the poststructuralist critique that self-presentation is performative. Skeptical readers may rightly regard claims to credibility, veracity, and sincerity as slippery. Yet the assertion of authenticity is crucial to certain users, such as those disclosing victimization or transgression, and to certain kinds of sites—those devoted to coming out, weight loss, illness, or grief, for example. Noting how a site deploys strategies for winning belief and where it invokes guarantors of authenticity can illuminate the complexities of virtual reality, even when an identity is partially or wholly fabricated.
Understanding the use of branding. Corporate discourse now encourages people shaping their self-presentations to develop “Brand Me.” The self becomes a commodity to be packaged and brokered on media sites such as YouTube and on product-related sites. To project a desirable brand—digitally hip, sociable, metrosexual—users are encouraged to streamline their individual features into a “logo” or hashtag that guarantees consistent delivery of their “product” and updated status reports. The imperative to self-branding has also created a need to manage the brand: The industry of online reputation management has recently sprung up in part to redress reckless past self-disclosures that threaten to undermine a user’s assertion of brand coherence.
Parsing identity online. The expanding range of virtual environments makes identities increasingly manipulable. Indeed, some users regard online identities as only virtual, a matter of choice and invention among avatars, roles, and subject positions. But however malleable and interchangeable identities are online, they are qualified offline by the complexity of embodied social identities. As some scholars observe, the utopian vision of a web enabling the free play of identity can obscure how power and access are asymmetrically distributed across differences of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and other variables. It is important, then, to consider how distinctions of social identity may be blurred or dispersed in online self-presentation, and where an individual’s multiple, conflicting identities are homogenized or sidetracked. Identity “play” cannot erase the intersecting, historically specific aspects of offline social identities.
Assessing quantification. The shift to a computational self now enables individuals to become their own engines of quantification. Members of an international movement that calls itself the Quantified Self, whose motto is “self-knowledge through numbers,” digitally self-monitor bodily processes and daily activities. Gary Wolf, a leader of the group whose mission has been called “the data-driven life,” suggests that measuring what we eat, how much we sleep, and what we do on a daily basis can change how we think about ourselves. The Quantified Self, paradoxically at once singular and anonymous through numeric code, is a new way of conceiving the self. “When we quantify ourselves,” Wolf observed in a New York Times article, “there isn’t the imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level. Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we ought to get to know.”
Quantification can also be mobilized by artists to interrogate the digital-management practices of governments and corporations. A case in point is the artist Hasan Elahi, who responded to his airport detainment and repeated interrogations by federal authorities after September 11, 2001, by setting up a website for continuous self-surveillance. Elahi photographs and posts his GPS location every day—in gas stations, airports, toilets—though he never includes his body. His self-tracking project suggests that self-quantification can also be used as an aesthetic and political critique.
Unquestionably, online environments juxtapose multiple media in ways that generate new possibilities for self-representation. Users can be seen as recombinant matter—assembling their profiles from disparate sources, being interactively reshaped by other users. The digital shift in sites and modes of self-presentation prompts several questions:
- How does the explosion of virtual self-authorship deform or reform who we understand ourselves to be?
- How might the protocols and politics of online sites prescribe and enforce ideological norms of identity, belonging, and communicative practice?
- How does the chronicling of moments in the continuing, updateable present of online lives alter humanist views of the depth, interiority, and reflexivity of the self?
- How are the disciplinary practices of online environments shifting the dynamic tension between the right to privacy assumed offline and the surveillance of selves and life stories by governments, corporations, and other people?
As users become simultaneously self-presenters, self-curators, consumers of others’ lives, and bricoleurs of individual and collective histories, we enter a new age in which it is urgent to investigate how digital environments are reconstructing both the public spaces and the private intimacies of our networked selves.
