Biography

the costs of living online: being private in public

The caption of Peter Steiner’s famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon—“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”—figures in two of the contributions to this issue. It serves as one of the epigraphs to Kylie Cardell and Emma Maguire’s essay on the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog hoax, and for Molly Pulda, in her analysis of James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, it “sums up the possibilities of escaping identity in an earlier era of online browsing” (197). The relevance of Steiner’s early commentary on online masquerading has endured for more than two decades, but in the context of these authors’ engagements with cases of autobiographical fraud and identity theft, it takes on a darker tone that indicates the significant cultural-historical gap between 1993, the year in which the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) made the World Wide Web available to the general public, and the online world of today. That very gap is the theme of a cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez that appears in the February 23 & March 2, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in which two dogs closely resembling those in Steiner’s original cartoon sit in the foreground, with their owner at his desktop computer behind them. One dog asks the other, “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody knew who you were?” (Figure 1).

As a result of what Paul Arthur, in his coda to this issue, calls “a lifetime collection of emails, tweets, downloads, Facebook entries, digital medical data, online chats, blogs, photographs, and so on” (313), too many people now know—or potentially can know—who we are online. Our lives are exposed to the actual and algorithmic gaze of potentially thousands of “visitors,” from criminal networks operating outside the law to government agencies—such [End Page viii]

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Figure 1.

Kaamran Hafeez/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank © Copyright Condé Nast.

as the National Security Administration in the United States—operating beyond the boundaries of constitutionality. Most of us cannot help but entrust personal information to the network in order to get on with the everyday business of our lives, from paying our bills to keeping up with our friends, but we know that doing so makes us vulnerable to unwelcome surveillance, stalking, identity theft, and a wide range of increasingly sophisticated scams. In addition to creating a market for products like LifeLock, a subscription service that monitors its customers’ credit history for signs of fraud, this exposure has been spurring many people to lock down their online lives, as Jodi Dean anticipated in her 2010 study of blogging:

Anxious before the gaze, before the disturbing inquiries and intrusions of unknown others, unsure about what to expect, about whether one is succeeding or failing, whether others are friends or foes, we build more reliable, apparently intimate networks. We may not know everyone in our intimate network, but we know they are friends—we had to friend them. Someone has vouched for them.

(57) [End Page ix]

In Dean’s view, although Web 2.0 offers “new ways for us to imagine ourselves, immense varieties of lifestyles with which we can experiment” (57), the price we pay for these opportunities is the provisionality and vulnerability of whatever identities we take on in the shifting spheres of private and public online life, subject as they are to prying eyes as well as to the social network’s ever-shifting dynamics of power and prestige.

In 2003, many contributors to “Online Lives” articulated concerns— their own, or those reflected in the texts they studied—about what was already perceived as a crumbling public/private binary. Madeleine Sorapure, for example, shared several bloggers’ “disclaimers” or “rules” that attempted to separate online and offline lives, asking those who knew them in “real life” not to read the blogs because they were too personal, too revealing, meant for a (non-intimate) public (10–13). Laurie’s own contribution opened with her sense of discomfort about reading these very personal, often very quotidian narratives, even though she recognized they were intended for a readership. Similarly, Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd’s 2004 “Blogging as Social Action” positioned blogs as the canary in the coal mine for new (and fraught) definitions of the public and private. Reading blogs as both product and producer of contemporary cultural shifts that included the celebrification of the ordinary, the market for “misery lit,” and the traction of Western therapeutic frameworks that counsel the value of “sharing,” Miller and Shepherd examined how blogs enable the performance of the private in public that Clay Calvert calls “mediated exhibitionism” and “mediated voyeurism” (qtd. in Miller and Shepherd), and that Hal Niedzviecki refers to as “peep culture” (1). This tension between the public and private characterized two dominant frameworks for viewing “the Web”: as a democratizing space for diversity and dialogue (enabled by going public), and as an unseemly confessional that encouraged too much sharing by too many people, transgressing the boundaries of decorum, social hierarchies, and in some cases, legality. Debates about online practice stood in for larger, unspoken social and cultural concerns about what should be said, and by whom, in the public, interactive space of Web 2.0.

Interestingly, the brouhaha over blogs that these scholars captured came almost a decade after individuals first started writing lives online. Pioneering internet diarist Justin Hall started Justin’s Links in 1994, posting about all aspects of his life in extraordinarily intimate, often NSFW, detail, and was joined by other early adapters such as Steve Schalchlin and Carolyn Burke. But as Rebecca Blood has noted, blogs didn’t boom until technological change made them accessible to non-specialist users: with the launch of Blogger.com and other sites that didn’t require knowledge of coding, “[o]nce literally anyone could [End Page x] make a weblog, literally anyone did” (x). We can attribute the early twenty-first century moral panics about blogging—surely echoing similar panics about the use of the telephone or the television set—to this sharp increase in practice: hundreds of thousands of blogs had significant cultural force.

Our contributors to this issue remind us, though, that definitions of “public” and “private” remain highly contested terrain, long after the establishment of Web 2.0. Blogs may have “invited” the public in to the private, creating a Habermasian public sphere, as Torill Mortenson and Jill Walker, among others, have suggested (257), but the disclosure was mostly uni-directional, a “one-to-many” distribution model with the blogger leading the conversation. The rise of social network sites (SNSs) mid-decade changed that model: networked interactivity is a many-to-many structure, with a range of participants being private in public. With over one billion users on Facebook alone (“Company Info”), SNSs foreground the limits of the binary. Indeed, if blogs ran the first steamroller through that binary, SNSs have now paved an eight-lane information highway right through traditional definitions of these concepts. And yet the debates continue, with the terms unchanged, though perhaps the implications have shifted. Public concerns continue to beat the drum of social decay resulting from “too much information.” “Oversharing” was the word of the year in both 2008 (Niedzvecki 1) and 2014 (Flood), suggesting common codes of decorum that continue to be violated because of digital platforms that perpetuate the onslaught of disclosure.

Like blogs before them, selfies are the current lightning rod for censure, with moral panics about people snapping (and sharing) photos at funerals (Gibbs, Nansen, Carter, and Kohn), Ground Zero and Auschwitz (“Curse”), and before or after a plane crash (“Worst Flight”; Zimmerman). Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, Marcus Carter, and Tamara Kohn summarize the dominant public response to this phenomenon: people “wondered what has happened to our humanity, and if social media had emptied everything, even death, of meaning and gravitas” (1). Bans on “selfie sticks” (Kim) stir the pot of public discord about how much is too much, and reinvigorate condemnations of what appears to be the rampant narcissism of digital culture.

All this sharing, fuelled by and fuelling the need to produce and consume more and more lives, comes, again, with anxieties about how to do it and who can do it. Geert Lovink notes that with Web 2.0 comes an “obligation” to join in to be with “everybody else” (13). But as the debates about selfies illustrate, joining in needs to happen in very particular ways. Policing of access to, and self-performances in, these digital spaces reminds us of the power dynamics that the Web failed to dismantle: as danah boyd notes in her essay in this issue, cyberspace remains highly normative. When boyd started blogging, she [End Page xi] joined a community dominated by “geeks, freaks, and queers,” and now it’s “mainstream”—“the status quo” instead of what “challenged the status quo” (306). Memes about auto-correct fails and parents texting (badly) are two relatively benign instances of such policing, examples of “newbie shaming” (or, more properly, “oldie-shaming”) that, by making public texts that were intended to be private, demarcate circles of belonging, insider status, and expertise, a hierarchy of who should be using these technologies, and how they should be used. Doxxing—the public posting of information, such as real names and addresses, that users would have a reasonable expectation of keeping private—is, as Molly Pulda considers in this issue, one way that power is exerted by some users over others. 2014’s Gamergate, when Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and other women who critiqued misogyny in the video game industry were subject to an online intimidation campaign that included doxxing and rape and death threats, made clear how the public and private, online and offline, remain highly relevant boundaries.

At the same time we observe these practices of shaming and norming in response to online lives, we note how other stories of social media and its benefits gain traction. Individuals and organizations have harnessed the global reach and communicative power of social network sites to make political as well as personal statements, through their own profiles, pages, and activities such as comments, likes, or retweets and repins. Memes in which users substitute their own profile pictures with public service announcements (for instance, about mental illness or breast cancer) are one local instance of the potential consciousness-raising role of social network sites. Importantly, and we think uniquely, social networks enable such conversations, and the social, cultural, and political critique embedded in them, to happen as part of the chronicles of everyday life rather than in separate texts or spaces that might be more explicitly seen as political and might therefore only be encountered by those who looked for them. Because the platforms do not by default distinguish kinds of content (though the algorithms can certainly be taught to by users), protest posts and other interventions into public dialogue can appear alongside the records of meals eaten, photos taken, and milestones reached, which a potentially diverse audience will encounter in its newsfeeds. This convergence makes explicit that for some individuals, the political is an important part of their identities—not a distinct public or professional practice, but an inherent element of how they live online and off. In many networked lives, the political is not only personal but also collective, with opportunities for broad engagement on urgent issues. In such instances, we see how online lives, with their assemblages of public and personal, can propel the political and transformative work of life narratives on a global scale. [End Page xii]

Perhaps these engagements are what Mark Zuckerberg imagined in coining the company motto that sharing will “make the world more open and connected” (“Facebook: About”); in other words, Facebook (and social networks more broadly) makes the world, and us, better. Zuckerberg’s vision of better living through networking reflects early Web 1.0 optimism, though with a corporate flavor (notably, Facebook is frequently in legal trouble for violating users’ expectations of privacy and profiting from those violations). Similar panegyrics have followed democratic uprisings—most notably the Arab Spring, but more recently Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution, and the #blacklivesmatter meme—in which social media played a key role. In social movements like these, the mobilization of online channels to connect people and exchange information, often circumventing restrictions on the freedom of speech and public assembly, clearly demonstrates the potential of these media to create virtual spaces for public discourses that can transform social relations. Gillian Whitlock’s essay in this issue on the YouTube testimonials of people seeking asylum in Australia offers an example on a smaller scale of how individuals can appropriate social media to document abuses, expose perpetrators, and solicit support.

However, precisely by making the world “more open and connected,” the fusion of private and public domains in social media has left many of us feeling more exposed and even endangered. In the United States, for example, higher education has become a sphere in which the blurring of these lines now poses concrete threats to individuals’ civil rights and livelihoods. In 2014, the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign rescinded its job offer to Steven Salaita on the basis of his expressions of outrage at Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, which he published on his personal Twitter account (Schmidt). A year later, Saida Grundy came under fire at Boston University for tweeting about the enduring legacy of racism in American culture, again on her own Twitter account (Krantz). Grundy subsequently made her account private—a move that seems to confirm Dean’s concerns about a shrinking of the online public sphere. While the creation of virtual publics can certainly promote more democratic forms of governance, the ambiguity about where the rights and obligations of private life end and those of public life begin also creates conditions in which personal liberties can be hampered, when they are not directly abrogated.

This atmosphere of uncertainty and vulnerability, we argue, is transforming not only our relationships with other people but also our experience of our own identities, and consequently, our practices of self-representation. To a significant degree, the ongoing construction of our online selves has been infused with an impulse to manage risk, not only to safeguard our finances and reputations, but also to ward off a kind of disintegration, the unsettling [End Page xiii] loss of control over the bits and pieces of “ourselves” adrift on the Internet. As Arthur observes in the conclusion to his coda, “with the exponential increase in data about ourselves and others, we have entered the era of the dispersed self. Versions of the subject can, of course, be ‘aggregated’ in all kinds of permutations, but this is most likely to happen mechanically and remotely, beyond the subject’s sphere of influence and without her knowledge.” In light of this situation, Arthur asks, “Will there be a backlash? Will nostalgia for the old unified self, mythical or not, take hold?” (318). Arthur’s questions, which might be seen as corollary to Smith’s, are directed toward culture in general but also, more pointedly, toward the field of auto/biography studies, where they invite us to assess our own theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the impact of social media, data mining, and the insecurity of personal information on the experience of selfhood, and consequently, on online auto/biographical performances. In the next sections, we reflect on three interconnected issues that seem especially important sites for critical reflection: the now widespread practice of auto/biographical curation; the intersection of online auto/biography and relations of production in the Internet economy, and in particular the phenomenon Axel Bruns calls “produsage”; and the falsification of identities and experiences in various forms of online auto/biographical imposture.

curating online lives

The dual forces of Web 2.0 and the “age of memoir,” as described by critics such as Leigh Gilmore and Julie Rak, excite contemporary anxieties about staying on top of valuable personal information, our own and others’. Traditional functions associated with the auto/biographical, including preserving and sharing material about a life for (self-)reflection, remain in place, but on a scale impossible to manage. Such anxieties are compounded by the ephemeral nature of online postings: they disappear, the links break, or as Arthur notes in this issue, the software becomes obsolete and unreadable. Ellen Gurber Garvey, in her study of nineteenth century scrapbookers, chronicles a similar confluence of cultural and technological shifts: a boom in “cheap newspapers” drove individuals to gather material they wished to preserve before it was lost. Like contemporary social media, she notes, to these readers newspapers presented both promise and problem, because they were “cheap, disposable, yet somehow tantalizingly valuable, if only their value could be separated from their ephemerality” (3–4). The scrapbook industry was born to give readers ways to preserve cuttings in personal collections, what Gurber Garvey calls “writing with scissors” (22). Whether or not these collections are annotated, the very act of their selection, ordering, and preservation in a [End Page xiv] bound volume (suggesting their value), can be read as an auto/biographical act that both responds to and is produced by technological change.

The Web 2.0 version of Gurber Garvey’s scrapbook enthusiasts is the digital “curator,” the individual engaged in gathering and exhibiting materials that address personal interests, and in so doing, giving these collected materials personal meaning. Lee Rainie, Joanna Brenner, and Kristin Purcell, in research conducted for the Pew Research Center, define two categories of internet users: “creators,” who “post original photos or videos,” and “curators,” who “take photos or videos they have found online and repost them on sites designed for sharing images with many people.” They note that “41% of adult internet users” fit into the latter category, and that the increased use and capabilities of mobile phones play a “major part” in the rise of the digital curator, because they enable users to take and upload photos easily. Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, in early work on user interfaces with social network sites, considered uploading and tagging photos as instances of “online autographics” (xv); the social media platforms that enable such sharing have developed to respond to and create the need for such autographics, just as scrapbooks did for newspaper readers. Whitlock and Poletti read as “auto assemblages” the layers of autobiographical “multimodal texts” on SNSs (xx). The curator indeed assembles the stuff of life—her own or others’—into the production of selves. Catherine Hall and Michael Zarro note that this “curator” is different from the model used by museum, library, or archival studies, in which there is institutional oversight; in Web 2.0 “anyone” can put together a collection of interesting sites and call it curating. If the early millennium was celebrated for the role of blogging and social media in creating the “citizen-journalist,” perhaps this stage is the time of the “citizen-curator.”

While this application of the term “curator” has emerged in the context of participatory cultures of Web 2.0, the actions the term describes have been necessary since content began to proliferate online. Sorting and sharing the materials of the Internet was the primary function of the first blogs: the original “link plus annotations” formula (Powazek) was driven by a desire to find the best of the Web and make it accessible to others (Blood). That practice was seen as distinct from the auto/biographical, as captured in defensive posturing by “bloggers” when “Internet diarists” co-opted the term for longer, explicitly personal posts that embedded links as part of a life narrative (e.g., Talbot). Surely, though, webloggers were equally engaged in acts of “auto/curation” (McNeill, “Digital Dioramas”), with a self emerging through the compilation, categorization, and circulation of one’s “favorite things.” Inherent to such collecting is a sense of (shared) value: the value of collecting as an activity, the value of one’s particular collection, and the value to others of sharing this collection. [End Page xv]

While curators on sites such as Storify focus on news items, other curators address the reams of personal material that have been a key driver of Web 2.0 development, with legions of sites, networks, and apps built around the shared production of auto/biography (McNeill, “Life Bytes”). The predominance of the auto/biographical on the Web has validated the sharing of lives as a legitimate cultural practice, and creates desire to participate in that sharing. Digital curation offers a new way to do so. These auto/curators see personal and collective meaning in something random, something that otherwise might be tossed away, forgotten, an inconsequential thing meant for another purpose. Auto/curators comb through Awkward Family Photos, Tumblr accounts, magazines, and fashion blogs to find links, images, and content they find noteworthy—for whatever reason—and that they think others will find interesting, too. This action is creative in that it imposes an order on the dispersed fragments of material scattered across the web; this posting with pixels is also an implicitly auto/biographical act. In the materials’ new contexts, individual to each curator, auto/biographical meaning is made and offered to a community: significance emerges through collection, patterns, and items in juxtaposition. Further meaning is produced through engagement with other curators, who comment, “pin,” reblog, or link to this material as part of their own online presence.

Two sites offer compelling and influential instances of auto/biographical curating. On PostSecret, “a community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard” (PostSecret), founder Frank Warren selects from these anonymous postcard confessions to share at the original blog site, as well as on social media, in print books, and in touring art exhibits. Since the site’s launch in 2004, Warren has emerged as “the Most Trusted Stranger in America” (Fisher). Acting as lay therapist or confessor, Warren promotes the idea that telling secrets is a necessary and necessarily therapeutic act for both the card-maker and readers of it: “You will find your answers in the secrets of strangers” (“PostSecret Community”). As Anna Poletti argues, Warren inculcates in readers the universalizing narrative that “we all have secrets” (29); PostSecret promises the “healing power of confession” (32), with the warning that “secrets can kill us” (34). Drawing on Lauren Berlant, Poletti observes how PostSecret constitutes an “intimate public” by inviting auto/biographical participation, grounded in affect and “the normative power of the confessional form” (26, 29). In the participatory cultures of Web 2.0, however, that confession appears “democratized,” shared with wider PostSecret communities who both give and receive confessions, producing a sense of “belonging” (27). Warren, presiding over this public, takes on an expert position that results entirely from his collecting and sharing the material [End Page xvi] of others’ lives in a forum that invites ongoing contributions and participation through both social media and print communication. Through curating the auto/biographical acts of others (both the postcards and then responses to them on the community forum and social media), Warren builds his own public identity and narrative.

Like Warren, Maria Popova, of the Brain Pickings digest, has made both a career and an auto/biographical persona through her curating. Popova began her blog Brain Pickings in 2006, the online version of her “weekly email to seven friends.” Popova characterizes Brain Pickings, now also on Facebook and Twitter, as a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in—until you are.” Putting writers from an array of disciplines into conversation, Popova promotes a philosophy of discovery and creativity enabled by her curating. Brain Pickings is the reflection of Popova’s “mental pool of resources—knowledge, insight, information, inspiration, and all the fragments populating our minds—that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world.” Through sharing her “resources,” Popova aims to provide the space for readers to “connect countless dots,” “to combine and recombine these pieces and build new ideas.” While Warren engages with the PostSecret community, providing personalized commentary (signed “Frank,” as a signal of the intimacy of this group) and the occasional autobiographical anecdote, Popova rarely writes about herself in her Brain Pickings entries. She emerges, though, in her selection and summaries of “life lessons” from the writers and thinkers she curates on her site, and in her direction to readers to see these lessons as relevant to their own lives: “if you read one thing today,” is a common headline for her posts, drawing attention to a passage she finds particularly meaningful. She characterizes Brain Pickings as “culling ideas that shed light on what it means to live a good life.” In her sense that the Popovian idea of a “good life,” an assemblage of wisdom from Western literary and cultural leaders (Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Maurice Sendak, and Mary Oliver are frequent picks), is a shared, even universal, definition, she projects a self-image and invites others to see themselves reflected in it, too. The success of Brain Pickings indicates that her sense of common value is accurate: her Facebook page has generated over 3.3 million “likes,” and her Twitter account has 557,000 followers.¹

On a more individual level, millions of people engage in daily acts of auto/curation that constitute personal and communal selves. At Pinterest, the “social curation website” (Hall and Zorro) or online “pin-board,” over twenty million individuals trawl through collections of documents produced by other members, discovering shared interests in activities or items. They find and [End Page xvii] produce value in creating their own categories and browsing through others’, gathering images, quotes, and stories they like, and making meaning through building their own collections. This content curation allows individuals to use images of places, things, and activities to represent themselves to others on the site. Founder Ben Silbermann argues that “when we collect things and when we share those collections with people, that’s how we show who we are in the world” (qtd. in Chocana). With thirty-six categories for pins, including “cars and motorcycles,” “food & drink,” and “DIY & crafts,” Pinterest is a clearing-house for inspiration: its home page declares, “Join Pinterest to find (and save!) all the things that inspire you” (Pinterest). Through pinning (and commenting on and liking others’ pins), members declare their own interests as members of a community who share values. The site explains that Pinterest is “a place to discover ideas for all your projects and interests, hand-picked by people like you” (“Pinterest: About,” emphasis added). Groomed by social media, particularly Facebook, to position themselves in online communities through their cultural consumption (Zhau, Grasmuck, and Martin), Pinterest members window-shop for experiences, behaviors, and goods they find “inspirational,” as vetted by “people like them.” They therefore curate “inspired” lives—lives they may not have, but wish they did. Curation in this case constitutes aspirational auto/biography: concepts of “good lives” created through “good” living.²

Auto/curators are also avid collectors of data about themselves, a curiosity encouraged by social media platforms. We might think of selfies as an instance of such self-curating, a persistent exhibiting of one’s self-image to represent different experiences. The popularity of “Throwback Thursdays,” in which individuals scan and share old (often pre-digital) photos of themselves, marks another instance of curatorial, even archival practice: material from one’s past gains renewed relevance and existence because it is made public, where it can be consumed and commented on by a larger network. Facebook’s Timeline, which launched in 2011, encouraged this sense that one’s entire life needs to be networked: the profile now begins with “birth” and members are invited to fill in the blanks between that date and the date of one’s Facebook “birth,” when they joined the network. In 2012 and 2014, Facebook algorithmically curated members’ lives, offering “Year in Review” slideshows based on an individual’s photos that generated the most uptake by one’s network, through likes or comments (Chowdhry). The site created a video for every network user, who could opt to share it. These videos reinforce the traditional auto/biographical notion that lives should be examined, or “reviewed,” and in a Web 2.0 context, that review should be done publicly. A Facebooked life review necessarily defaults to a positive framework; the slideshows ran with the [End Page xviii] upbeat tagline, “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it,” a move that generated significant negative press due to complaints by users who had not had a “great year” (Chowdhry).

Some digital enthusiasts turn to platforms to actively generate and organize the data for such self-reflection, using technologies to “become their own quantification engines” (Smith and Watson, “Virtually Me” 87). As Madeleine Sorapure also discusses in this issue, Web 2.0 enables the surveillance and sharing of the “Quantified Self”: data about the sleeping, eating, fitness, and other habits that users can track using devices such as the FitBit and upload to social media. The charts and graphs these devices and software produce give such “lifeloggers” means through which to interpret how they live, and by extension, who they are: their numbers tell their stories. While offline enthusiasts have long used diaries, for example, to track themselves, both the scope and potential reach of these records is a product of digital culture. The technology enables more advanced and pervasive capturing, and the cultural practice sets up the expectation that one will share the results as part of one’s broader online profile (i.e., not just to one’s online running group). The “data-driven life,” as Gary Wolf describes it, takes the self as the object to curate, and submits that auto/biographical assemblage of qualities and quantities into the relays of exchange, sampling, appropriation, and reuse in which the cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions of the Internet are enmeshed.

produsing online lives

Many of the contributors to this issue point to the transformation in relations of production and consumption Web 2.0 has brought about, and reflect on the implications of these developments for online auto/biography. Drawing on the work of Vincent Miller, Rak describes the players of The Sims as “prosumers” who go beyond their role of consumers to generate and exchange content with game developers and other players. Graham, Pulda, and Whitlock all enlist Axel Bruns’s notion of “produsage”: the ongoing, collaborative, and putatively democratic production of online resources by the users of those resources. For Bruns, produsage represents an Internet-driven transformation of the conventional models for the manufacturing and distribution of goods, especially in the spheres of culture and entertainment. Produsers, Bruns argues, “channel content into curated collections which improve that content’s ‘findability’ for further users” (255), at once diminishing the traditional media industry’s control over content and boosting the status of the individual produser. In the domain of online auto/biography, we can see large-scale examples of collective produsage not only in the curatorial work of social [End Page xix] networks but also in the collaborative crafting of the Wikipedia biographies Graham examines. Individuals also act as produsers when they appropriate and recirculate existing online content in the service of self-representation, as do the stalker/impersonator who figures in Pulda’s article and the asylum seekers Whitlock discusses. These three essays add to a growing body of scholarship on social media and shifting patterns of production and exchange, which includes Aimée Morrison’s nuanced examination, in her essay in Identity Technologies, of how Facebook’s “coaxed affordances” create complex, mutually constituting relationships among users, audiences, and developers (see especially 125–27).

Bruns’s description of the outcome of produsage as “only a temporary artefact of the ongoing process, a snapshot in time which is likely to be different again the next minute, the next hour, or the next day” (28), applies aptly to the sequential, cumulative, and eminently updatable self-presentations in venues like Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, in which, Henry Jenkins observes, “each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information we have extracted from the ongoing flow of media around us and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives” (3–4). To some extent, all self-curators are self-produsers, cobbling together presentations of selfhood within networks of consumption and exchange that still bear the traces of a market economy. Even if they aren’t seeking “instafame” and commercial gain, online auto/ biographers remain subject to an imperative to produce appealing products in an environment shaped by more or less friendly competition, and for some of them, trying to keep up with that demand brings on the envy and depression Diane Josefowicz addresses in her essay in this issue. They are likewise subject to an imperative to consume the products they transmute through self-representational produsage. As David Palmer maintains in his analysis of online photo sharing, “contemporary capitalism requires that we must be willing to embrace continual transformation as an essential condition of contemporary subjectivity. Subsequently, life is framed as a series of events, and ‘self-realization’ becomes a driving force for promoting consumption” (156). Although it may run against the grain of old-style capitalist models of production, the logic of produsage also enlists the produser in the processes of self-defining consumption and market-driven self-fashioning that characterize life under neoliberal capitalism. “Even when it might be argued that Face-bookers and partiers on 2night.com are not consciously self-branding,” writes Alison Hearn, “they remain (as we all do) global value subjects. They are product, producer, and consumer, but they do not control the means of their own distribution. They remain captive to and conditioned by the controlling [End Page xx] interests of global flexible capital” (213). Bruns acknowledges that the results of collaborative produsage-driven projects remain vulnerable to absorption into traditional commercial enterprises (33), but he expresses his faith in the capacity of produsage communities to resist such appropriation. Reflecting, perhaps, the functional differences between collective and individual initiatives, some auto/biographical produsers are explicitly embracing opportunities to turn their projects into engines of lucrative self-promotion, while at the same time implicitly testifying to the instability and vulnerability of life in the present-day economy.

At least since the eighteenth century, with the advent of mass printing, audiences of auto/biography have always also served, to varying degrees, as markets for auto/biographical products (Rak 44–47). Social media have vastly extended the means of production of brandable, marketable lives; in their introduction to Identity Technologies, Poletti and Rak suggest that if we think inclusively about the wide range of auto/biographical performances we encounter on the Internet, “we can ask what the ‘products’ of identity are and whether they are part of late capitalist circulations of goods, and we can find out who produces and who consumes certain kinds of identities” (10). A striking example of one such product of identity—an identity as a product— is the celebrity YouTube vlogger Jenna Marbles, whose rise to fame Emma Maguire studies in a recent article in Biography. Invoking Bruns’s model, Maguire recognizes “sites for autobiographical engagement” such as YouTube and other media-sharing platforms as “spaces where produsers develop and promote their personal brands” (78).³ In addition to a wide range of other prominent YouTube prosumers and self-produsers, such as Joey Graceffa, Michelle Phan, and Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie), examples of the marketing of auto/ biographical performances include crowd-funded and commercially marketed curatorial and lifestyle-promotion projects such as Popova’s Brain Pickings, Foster Huntington’s The Burning House and Home Is Where You Park It, Colin Wright’s Exile Lifestyle blog and his many spin-off books, and the living-with-less campaign of The Minimalists Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, who have parlayed their departure from well-compensated corporate employment into a successful publishing and public-speaking enterprise. While Bruns’s model of produsage can offer scholars in the field of auto/biography studies one way to describe the processes through which these author/curators “produse” cultural artifacts, we may need to find other conceptual frameworks to help us understand how such online self-fashioning and self-promoting initiatives articulate with—and at least potentially push back against—the production of subjectivity itself within the ideological apparatuses of contemporary capitalist society. [End Page xxi]

The work of political theorist Isabell Lorey seems particularly relevant here, as it focuses on what Lorey sees as a significant trend among workers in the “creative” sector of the economy, a group that includes all of the individuals we have just mentioned. In response to diminishing prospects for long-term employment and the erosion of state-supported services and protections, many of these people, Lorey argues, are now deliberately taking on temporary, unstable work to craft DIY lifestyles and careers that incorporate that very instability as a hallmark, if not a badge of honor. Lorey calls this strategy “self-precarization.” Because freelance assignments hold out to people “the promise of the ability to take responsibility for their own creativity and fashion their lives according to their own rules,” designers, writers, musicians, programmers, and a range of consultants “freely” assume their inherent precarity “as a desirable, supposedly normal condition of existence” (197). In Lorey’s view, although this behavior is most evident within the creative professions, in the end neoliberal ideology compels all of us to “self-precarize”: “Currently everybody has to become ‘creative’ and to design her/himself to sell her/his whole personality on the market of affective labor. Short-term, insecure, and low-wage jobs, often named ‘projects,’ are becoming normal for the bigger part of society: precarization is in a process of normalization” (Berlant et al. 164). Lorey’s argument falls in line with positions David Graeber and Wendy Brown have recently taken, both of whom argue that the ideology of neoliberalism encourages each of us to think of ourselves not only as good capitalists but also as valuable capital that needs to be invested and maximized. We are all compelled to see ourselves as “tiny corporations,” as Graeber puts it (376), because, in Brown’s terms, “when competition becomes the market’s root principle, all market actors are rendered as capitals, rather than as producers, sellers, workers, clients or consumers. As capitals, every subject is rendered as entrepreneurial, no matter how small, impoverished, or without resources, and every aspect of human existence is produced as an entrepreneurial one” (65). From the perspective of these critics, the precarization to which neoliberal capitalism subjects us puts our very selfhood on the defensive, and compels us to privilege our own self-interest over the welfare of others. We are forced to be competitive and even mercenary, to see other people not only as rivals for market share but also as potential markets in themselves and even as potential raw materials for our own projects.⁴ And we are to cloak these essentially anti-social impulses in the guise of creativity, innovation, “thinking outside the box,” and social networking.

Even if we do not entirely subscribe to it, this grim vision of contemporary life and creative labor might inspire us to recalibrate some of our critical responses to a range of online auto/biographical phenomena, examining [End Page xxii] them against the backdrop of endemic economic precarity and the corrosive effects of that instability on social bonds. This perspective might, for example, introduce a measure of skepticism into analyses that assume, if not celebrate, a liberation via social media from the shackles of traditional capitalist relations of production, an approach some interpretations of Bruns’s work might underwrite.⁵ By the same token, it might complicate critiques of revenue-generating auto/biographical performances as merely instances of the crass commodification of identities. In addition, an acknowledgement of the atmosphere of risk, instability, competition, and pressure to perform in which many members of our society are now composing their online self-representations may encourage more nuanced critical perspectives on the range of deceptive and sometimes destructive auto/biographical performances that have been proliferating in online environments since the advent of the Internet.

faking and filtering online lives

We were struck by the number of submissions focusing on the phenomena of online hoaxes, impersonation, stalking, and identity theft. Of the authors in this issue, Pulda, Cardell and Maguire, Graham, and Josefowicz are tapping into a broad stream of popular and scholarly engagement with the ethical and political ramifications of auto/biographical misrepresentation in media of all kinds. In June 2015, for example, the US public was captivated by the exposure of civil-rights activist Rachel Dolezal’s masquerade as an African American (Flaherty), a case which in turn revived long-standing questions about indigenous studies scholar Andrea Smith’s claims to a Cherokee heritage (Jaschik).⁶ As we know from notorious cases like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski/Bruno Dösekker’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, print media, and to some extent photography and film, have long offered authors resources for impersonation, plagiarism, and slander. The affordances of social media have added catfishing, sockpuppeting, astroturfing, and various other ruses to the auto/biographical fraudster’s repertoire.⁷ The case of “Joan,” a male psychiatrist posing as a disabled woman in a CompuServe chat space, which Sherry Turkle discusses in her 1997 book Life on the Screen (228–30), is an early example of online imposture. In 2013, the alleged hoodwinking of Notre Dame football player Manti Te‘o by a man posing as “Lennay Kekua,” Te‘o’s terminally ill online girlfriend, fleetingly captured the attention of American media (Zeman). The demise in early 2015 of the initially popular social media app Secret, which allowed users to post anonymously within their networks, has been attributed in part to the impersonation and bullying the service seemed to foster (Chapman). By making [End Page xxiii] so much data about individuals so widely available, and by creating spaces in which we can enjoy rich, intimate relationships with other people without ever meeting them in person, Web 2.0 supplies nefarious “produsers” powerful new resources for “making, taking, and faking” lives, to adapt the title of G. Thomas Couser’s chapter on the ethics of collaborative life writing in Vulnerable Subjects. Indeed, whether the fraud involves a single violation, such as lifting a real person’s profile picture to represent a fabricated individual (as in the case of Jelena Lecic’s Facebook photo, discussed in Cardell and Maguire’s “Hoax Politics: Blogging, Betrayal, and the Intimate Public of A Gay Girl in Damascus”), or the seizure and manipulation of all the elements of a person’s online self-representation (as in the case of James Lasdun’s experience, examined by Pulda), targets of online impersonation become unwitting co-produsers of a life story that at once is and isn’t their own. Insofar as they exploit available information about the lives of real people, hoaxers and impersonators are essentially biographers posing as autobiographers, their misappropriation of another’s life reminding us of the complex, usually asymmetrical distribution of power along the boundary marked by the slash in “auto/biography.”

Along with these new conditions of possibility for the calculated, sometimes malicious, faking of identities and life stories, does Web 2.0 also offer new modalities of the more routine deceptions, omissions, and fictionalizations that many scholars of life writing regard as inevitable components of autobiographical discourse? On the one hand, Nicole B. Ellison and danah boyd have noted that “people’s self-presentation on social network sites may be less highly embellished when compared to sites without visible connections, such as online dating sites” (164), because on SNSs posts and comments from other people tend to bolster the credibility of individual members’ claims.⁸ Faking a life on a “nonymous” (Zhau, Grasmuck, and Martin) social network such as Facebook is likely to take significantly more effort than perpetuating a blog hoax. On the other hand, on sites like Facebook and Instagram, the processes of curation and produsage we discuss above, coupled with an array of social expectations that vary from audience to audience, foster lower-intensity, finer-grained embellishments and omissions that deserve more attention from auto/biography scholars, as they raise old questions about truth-telling in autobiography in the context of a new configuration of cultural norms and technological means of self-representation. As Gillian Whitlock similarly argues in her analysis of pseudonymous Iraqi blogger Salam Pax, digital forms of auto/biography reflect “transformation and experiments in ways that selves are imagined and constructed now,” and “create new horizons for thinking about . . . autobiographical practice” (4, 1). Within these new horizons, questions about truth continue to have urgency: [End Page xxiv] media coverage of the suicide of nineteen-year-old University of Pennsylvania undergraduate Madison Holleran in 2014, for example, dwells on the marked discrepancy between Holleran’s Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posts, all of which projected the image of a happy, well-adjusted student athlete, and the extreme distress she was privately undergoing. Kate Fagan’s observation that Holleran “seemed acutely aware that the life she was curating online was distinctly different from the one she was actually living” (“Split Image”) points to the ambivalent connotation “curation” has recently acquired in public discourse, where it not only serves to designate the practice of assembling, styling, and caring for collections but also at times impugns it as window-dressing and disguise.⁹ Within the context of auto/biography studies, this ambivalence comes as no surprise. If we accept curation as an autobiographical act, we understand that its products will correlate no more reliably or consistently with the actual lived experience of their creators than do the outcomes of any other process of self-representation.

In fact, we might ask if Holleran’s selective posts are really any different from the smiling photographs and cheerful letters with which people covered up their sorrow in the days before the Internet. Moreover, since social networks are, after all, social, we might ask if her process of selection is any different from what Erving Goffmann describes in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as an individual’s constant negotiation between the “frontstage” and “backstage” areas of her life (see 128). If we consider the time frames within which people are now staging their online presentations of self in the form of visual and verbal texts, however, we may recognize an affective, phenomenological shift in the complex and not always fully conscious act of what Goffman calls “impression management” (206) when it moves onto social network sites. Describing autobiography’s inherent susceptibility to duplicity, Susanna Egan has called attention to the gap between flesh-and-blood autobiographers and the “textual identities” they construct; in her view, “the space between the living, breathing human being who writes and this verbal construct, this textual identity, provides room for the imposture” (26). At first glance, less-than-factual textual identities on social media do not distinguish themselves significantly from their offline counterparts, but given the speed at which their composition moves to their publication for ever-present audiences who offer immediate feedback, it does seem that something has changed in the nature of the “space” that facilitates pretense for authors of online self-representations. Many of the reports on Madison Holleran’s suicide highlight the detail that only an hour elapsed between Holleran’s last post to Instagram—a photograph of holiday lights in Philadelphia’s Ritten-house Square—and her death (Babcock and Saul; Fagan, “Split Image”). In [End Page xxv] SNSs, the interval between writer and text, which Egan imagines in spatial terms, might be better figured temporally, as an experience of time characterized above all by the urgency of the demand on “living, breathing human beings” to sustain the visual and verbal online constructions that purport to represent them. As many critics have pointed out, this pressure to update entails an expectation to conform to protocols of self-presentation, enforced by the interfaces of SNS platforms, the social conventions of their users, and the cultural scripts of late capitalism (see, for example, Cover 61; McNeill, “There Is No ‘I’ ” 67–70; and Morrison 116–17). Although it is hardly the case that we all routinely bend the truth about our lives to fit predetermined, “likable” molds, our exposure to the constant, expectant gaze of prospective audiences creates a rhetorical situation that pressures us to take on, simultaneously and perpetually, the roles of curator, dramaturge, and censor of our moment-to-moment performances of selfhood within our online networks. As Laurie has suggested, we are “learning to shape [our] offline narratives and selves in Face-booked ways” (“There Is No ‘I’ ” 67), evaluating at least some of our immediate experiences in terms of how our photos and descriptions of them might be received by our friends and followers and making our selections accordingly. What Egan identifies as a largely static, “spatial” gap between living, breathing authors and textual identities in the medium of print, in social media becomes a dynamic, “chronic” condition of serial (and more or less dissembling) self-editing, with symptoms ranging from exhilaration to anguish.

In search of rigorous, sensitive approaches to the various forms of faking and filtering we find in social media, scholars can draw upon the substantial body of recent work on imposture in print autobiography, including Egan’s Burdens of Proof, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s essay “Witness or False Witness,” proposing a supple set of “metrics of authenticity” for assessing first-person witness narratives (to which several authors in our issue refer), and Leigh Gilmore’s recent “Learning from Fakes: Memoir, Confessional Ethics, and the Limits of Genre,” in which she cautions against uncritically privileging autobiographical transparency and overlooking “the ongoing appeal of certain kinds of stories and the identificatory desire they elicit” (23), even when those stories turn out not to be true.¹⁰ Although these critics focus primarily on memoir, testimony, and trauma narrative in print, the theoretical insights they offer can help frame studies of examples of online strategies of self-fashioning that also invite us to rethink the place of fact and fabrication in autobiography. Ethnographic projects like Patricia Lange’s Kids on YouTube, which Lange describes in this issue, suggest strategies for accessing people’s own understanding of the incommensurable aspects of their on- and offline lives. In addition, because both high- and low-intensity forms of online imposture so often entail sustaining a coherent, convincing narrative, Julie [End Page xxvi] Rak’s essay, in which she interrogates our cultural and disciplinary investments in seeing life as a “story,” and explores the potential of virtual-reality simulations as alternative means of living and telling a life, may also inspire new ways of thinking about what it means to tell the truth or to dissemble in autobiographical discourse, and why it matters to us to know the difference.

Precisely because the private and public spheres no longer map neatly onto offline and online life, the stakes of coming to terms with the theoretical, ethical, and political implications of Sidonie Smith’s question about auto/biography in Web 2.0—“To what extent do these phenomena affect the organization of consciousness?”—are quite high. As Poletti and Rak suggest in their introduction to Identity Technologies, careful scholarly attention to the impact of the Web and other digital technologies on auto/biographical practices can help us understand “what older identity forms such as citizenship might mean in light of proliferating forms of self-expression through various media” (20). We would like to suggest, in turn, that although it entails real risks, our constant exposure to the curated, prodused, filtered, and sometimes falsified online lives of others offers us many ways to enrich our experiences of selfhood, expand our communities, and shape our social institutions by participating in the political process. It is certainly true that too many people know who we are online (and that we can’t always know who they are), but giving in to the temptation to build firewalls to mitigate that exposure and uncertainty is likely to cut too many people, too many encounters, and too many occasions for self-reflection out of our lives. “With fewer strangers,” Dean writes, “the tightly knit networks into which we retreat are comforting insofar as they buffer us from the open uncertainties disrupting our attempts to sense who we are or might be” (57). The right to privacy is certainly worth protecting, and as cases like Steven Salaita’s and Saida Grundy’s indicate, we need to clarify jurisdictions across private, public, and professional spheres of online life. At the same time, we have to preserve the opportunities social media afford us to sustain and expand our relationships with others, relationships though which we participate in the moral and political life of our society and within which—if we take the notion of the relational self at all seriously—we have become and are perpetually becoming who we are.

overview of contributions

“Online Lives 2.0” is made up of essays of three different kinds. Along with five full-length scholarly articles, we have included “updates” from four of the original contributors to the 2003 “Online Lives” issue, along with four essays by authors who, in different ways, represent practitioners of online auto/biography. Throughout this introduction we have gestured toward many of these [End Page xxvii] contributions; to help orient our readers to the collection as a whole, we offer the following synopses of what each author brings to the conversation.

learning to listen

In the conclusion of his introduction to the 2003 “Online Lives” issue, John turned to a set of images documenting the Sony Hypermask, a system for [End Page xxxvii] projecting animated faces onto motion-tracking masks in real time, and reflected on how that kind of projection technology might be pressed into the service of auto/biographical performances (xviii–xix). As we wrap up this introduction, we turn to an artwork that also makes use of projection, this time explicitly to engage questions regarding auto/biographical representation. The image on the cover of this issue is a photograph of Christopher Baker’s 2008 Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise, a multimedia installation made up of an imposingly large screen (twelve feet high and sixty feet long in some exhibitions) onto which cycles of clips from more than five thousand online video diaries are projected to create a moving, speaking quilt of faces. In the multi-channel audio recording, clearly discernable individual voices arise from and fade back into the murmur of the crowd. John was fortunate to experience Baker’s installation firsthand in the summer of 2011, when it was on display at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. In addition to the powerful aural impact of the work’s hypnotic babble punctuated with bursts of coherent speech, what particularly struck him was the visual-kinetic effect of the enfolding of the spectators’ bodies within the projected images, the bright ranks of faces slipping across their backs as they moved along the giant screen and unavoidably cast their shadows onto it (Figure 2).¹⁴

Describing his motivation to create Hello World!, Baker cites a set of concerns that many scholars of online auto/biography share. “I continue to be interested in the ways that new technologies affect our perceptions of self—particularly in the ways that technologies expand and extend our capabilities as humans,” he reports, going on to say that his installation explores “the promise of this technology to give formerly marginalized people the opportunity to be heard. This is incredibly attractive from a social justice and democratic perspective, but with each new speaker the cumulative effect is to drown out other speakers” (Cusak). Echoing danah boyd’s assertion in her essay in this issue that despite its promise of inclusion, the Internet still constitutes “the new mechanisms by which marginalization happens” (306), Baker observes that “it seems like we’ve created technologies that effectively amplify the voices of individuals, but we have yet to create technologies that enhance our ability to listen thoughtfully” (Cusak). The demands Baker’s installation places on its visitors are essentially the same demands that all online auto/biographical forms place on the scholars seeking to understand them. Faced with the overwhelming array of lives represented on the Internet, we have to pick and choose our objects of analysis, or following the lead of digital humanists, we have to devise methodological strategies for examining large numbers of auto/biographical acts and drawing defensible conclusions about them. We have [End Page xxxviii] to appreciate how much we can gain by drawing on the qualitative and quantitative work of our colleagues in other disciplines, including anthropology, communications, economics, media and film studies, psychology, and sociology. We have to recognize that the particular theories and methods we bring to bear in our projects will illuminate only some aspects of the phenomena we choose to study while casting shadows over others. We have to learn to “listen thoughtfully,” tuning in to voices that are not always heard and to meanings that are not immediately apparent. Above all, we have to talk to each other, in the way visitors to a museum talk to each other, about the ideas our contemplation has awakened in us.

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Figure 2.

Installation View of Christopher Baker’s Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise. Photo by Sarah Rust Sampedro. © Copyright and reproduced with permission of the artist and photographer.

As life online increasingly becomes simply life, the field of auto/biography studies is adapting accordingly, posing new questions, creating new concepts, making new connections to other disciplines, and tapping new resources for research and writing. We believe that “Online Lives 2.0” has captured some of that energy, and we hope our readers will be inspired by the outcome of what for us has been—and, we expect, will continue to be—a wonderfully collegial and thought-provoking conversation. [End Page xxxix]