Life History

Ruth Page, “Life History”

Cayla Bamberger

Life History: “A qualitative research method used in the social sciences and has currency as a term used to refer to the narrative genre known as the life story.” Episodic narration of personal experience

Background...

Interest in life histories comes from the “human impulse to tell stories”

Important distinction: life histories ≠ fictional narratives (digital fiction, e-mail novels)

Narrator is assumed to be giving an authentic, though selective, account of real events

Offline vs. Online Life HistoriesOffline

Written, oral

Reports the past

Often more formal

Examples: biography, memoirs, diary writing, oral history, pedagogic, and therapeutic interviews

Online

Little experience necessary to document daily experiences

Reports the present: commonly presented in archives that use reverse chronological ordering (blogs) and recency of activity (social network sites)

Examples: blogs, forums, social network sites, virtual worlds

Online Life Histories: Variance and Vibrancy Online life histories take advantage of the multimodal

possibilities of the 21st century Internet

Visuals, photographs, audiovisuals (YouTube, webcams), files (such as MP3 formats), and mobile audio/video recordings

Vary in subject matter and style

Feature not a contained narrative, but instead a “revisable self-portrait” developing as the narrator posts online

Many social media sites use chronology to organize a story (i.e. timestamps)

Posts are published episodically over time

Styles in storytelling vary: shifts in narrator, changing locations and outside communities

Collaborative; various audiences can interact with the narrator to shape the narrative

Online Life Histories: Transparency of the Narrator

Narrative as a mode of self-expression… MAYBE? Or maybe not that genuine?

“Identities enacted through storytelling are not transparent reflections of reality but are selective, fluid performances”

Life histories preserve and make accessible the voices of “everyday” narrators

HOWEVER: idealized self-representation, shaped to demands of given contexts (to be relatable to peers or create professional status)

Although Web 2.0 rhetoric emphasizes democracy, it seems that social media serves as a platform for the spread of stories to gain social/economic benefits

“Microcelebrity”: ordinary people can self-publish their experiences in an attempt to gain fame, and where an audience of peers becomes re-conceptualized as a fan base

Functions to establish individual and social identity

https://www.instagram.com/sincerelyjules/

Compare with SELFIECITYREVIEW: Selfiecity investigates selfies by using…

A demographic analysis (on people, their poses and expressions)

Visualizations in the form of image plots (that reveal interesting patterns)

An interactive component “selfiexploratory”

Essays

Latest organizational forms and media interface presentations bring together and relate text, images and numbers

Words (i.e. tags) and numbers (i.e. locations, timestamps) group together images that share data similarity

Selfie images -- though seemingly self-involved -- are uploaded to social media platforms to ultimately create a network with other similar images

Selfies tell the story of our lives and connect our life histories with the similar stories of others

Each post to social media is an episode, providing more information and greater insight into one’s life story

Selfies taken in different locales amongst various people contribute to the life story

Selfies are easy to post and don’t require skill

Easier than writing an autobiography!

Selfies are an example of one multimodal possibility in online storytelling

Selective: can choose what selfies to post and thus what story to tell through social media platforms

Questions to Consider

1.How authentic are typical online life histories?

2.Does technology allow for more detailed and up-to-date life histories? Or does it in fact introduce a less serious method of storytelling?