Abstract
This chapter investigates new forms of self-expression and the role of the forgotten for our digital remembering selves. New technologies of expression pose different challenges to the politics and performance of memory to those of traditional textual representation. Online self-expression is proliferating in many different forms across the internet, which raises questions about memory and forgetting, privacy and intimacy. This chapter will explore the different types of narrative of the self, created in third generation web pages, how daily self-expression impacts on our sense of self and our narratives of self and past history. This is especially relevant as the digital world has been renegotiating the possibility of forgetting, as the emphasis there is always by default on preserving and remembering; therefore, the place of the forgotten in self-expression has to be redeveloped.
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Notes
- 1.
Here I refer to danah boyd’s and Nicole B. Ellison’s definition of SNS’s as ‘web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.’ ‘Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship,’ Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 13.1 (2007): 210–230, p. 211. Note however the debate on the term network vs. networking in David Beer’s article, ‘Social Network(ing) Sites… Visiting the story so far: A response to d. boyd and N. Ellison,’ Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 14.1 (2008): 516–529.
- 2.
See for instance the Facebook Company's Third Quarter 2013 Result on http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=802760.
- 3.
This echoes Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation: ‘What is new about new media is therefore also old and familiar: that they promise the new by remediating what has gone before.’ Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 270.
- 4.
I address some of these issues in ‘The Online Self: Memory and Forgetting in the Digital Age,’ European Journal of Life Writing 3 (2014).
- 5.
Andrew Hoskins, ‘Digital Network Memory,’ Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, eds. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 91–107, p. 96.
- 6.
‘This Ideal Chronicler would be gifted with the faculty of being able to give an instantaneous transcription of whatever happens, augmenting his testimony in a purely additive and cumulative way as events are added to events. In relation to this ideal of a complete and definitive description, the historian's task would be merely to eliminate false sentences, to reestablish any upset in the order of true sentences, and to add whatever is lacking in this testimony.’ Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 145.
- 7.
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 3.
- 8.
The power of the internet to generate and influence such events is of course up for debate, but in terms of serving as a communicating and media tool in any such circumstances, it is without precedent. This is also a form of communications the authorities fear as Twitter and other such sites are often the first ones to be closed down or blocked by the authorities. A recent example is the protests in the early months of 2014 in Venezuela. A study by The Guardian and the London School of Economics into the 2011 London riots found that Twitter had not played a decisive role in spreading the word among rioters but had been an important tool for the media and in the clean-up that followed. See James Ball and Paul Lewis, ‘Twitter and the riots: How the news spread,’ in Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder, The Guardian, 7 December 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/07/twitter-riots-how-news-spread. For a comprehensive analysis of the possibilities of political activism online see Joss Hands, @ is for Activism (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011).
- 9.
Geoffrey Bowker, ‘The Past and the Internet,’ Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, ed. Joe Karaganis (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007), pp. 20–37, p. 26.
- 10.
Paul Connerton, ‘Seven types of forgetting,’ Memory Studies 1 (2008): 59–71, p. 65.
- 11.
These questions and profile patterns are based on the form Facebook displayed in January 2016. As the site is constantly evolving, this might not be true at the time of publication.
- 12.
David Kreps, ‘My social networking profile: copy, resemblance or simulacrum? A poststructuralist interpretation of social information systems,’ European Journal of Information Systems 19 (2010): 104–115, p. 112.
- 13.
Robert Cover, ‘Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking,’ Identity Technologies, eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), pp. 55–69, p. 55.
- 14.
See Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: The Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), i.e. pp. 174–175.
- 15.
Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, p. 7. Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How we create identity in narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 68.
- 16.
Eakin, Living Autobiographically, p. 2.
- 17.
Antonia Harbus, ‘Exposure to Life-Writing as an Impact on Autobiographical Memory,’ Memory Studies 4.2 (2011): 206–220.
- 18.
Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, ‘Introduction,’ Mediation, Remediaton, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, pp. 1–14, p. 2.
- 19.
Nancy Thumin, Self-representation and Digital Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 13.
- 20.
Thumin, Self-representation and Digital Culture, p. 138.
- 21.
Ugla Egilsdóttir, ‘Bannað á Facebook,’ Fréttablaðið, 2 January 2014, p. 38.
- 22.
Thumin, Self-representation and Digital Culture, p. 142.
- 23.
danah boyd and Alice Marwick, ‘Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies,’ A Decade in Internet Time. Symposium on the Dynamics of Internet and Society, September 2011. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1925128.
- 24.
Laura Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses: Theory, Criticsm, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 49.
- 25.
The leaking of the NSA files by Edward Snowden was revealed in 2013. The unfolding of the story can be seen here http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files.
- 26.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 2.
- 27.
Francisco Delich, ‘The Social Construction of Memory and Forgetting,’ Diogenes 201 (2004): 65–75, p. 69.
- 28.
Bowker, ‘The Past and the Internet,’ p. 23.
- 29.
Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading, ‘Introduction,’ Save as… Digital Memories, eds. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–26, p. 6.
- 30.
Bowker, ‘The Past and the Internet,’ p. 24.
- 31.
‘Acts of committing to the record (such as writing a scientific paper) do not occur in isolation—rather, they are embedded within a range of practices (technical, formal, social) that I define collectively as memory practices. Taken as a loosely articulated whole, these practices allow (to some extent) useful and/or interesting descriptions of the past to be carried forward into the future.’ Bowker, ‘The Past and the Internet,’ p. 25.
- 32.
A myriad of sites, companies, and books claim to offer a solution to this.
- 33.
Her case was widely reported in the media; see for instance Carmen Maria Machado, ‘The Afterlife of Farrenkopf,’ The New Yorker, 27 March 2014.
- 34.
Luis A. Castro and Victor M. González, ‘Afterlife Presence on Facebook: a Preliminary Examination of Wall Posts on the Deceased’s Profiles,’ Electrical Communications and Computers, 2012, 22nd International Conference, 27–29 February 2012, pp. 355–360, p. 355.
- 35.
Michael Massimi and Andrea Charise, ‘Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI,’ Proceedings CHI 2009 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2459–2468.
- 36.
See for instance Wendy Moncur and Annalu Waller, ‘Digital Inheritance,’ Digital Futures (October 10–12, 2010). See also Cindy Wiley et al., ‘Connecting Generations: Preserving Memories with Thanatosensitive Technologies,’ HCI International 2011 – Posters’ Extended Abstracts, ed. Constantine Stephanidis (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2011), pp. 474–478.
- 37.
Information on the process, development, and reasoning can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/index_en.htm .
- 38.
Tessa Mayes, ‘We have no right to be forgotten online,’ The Guardian, 18 March 2011: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/mar/18/forgotten-online-european-union-law-internet.
- 39.
Mayer-Schönberger, Delete, p. 119.
- 40.
A useful overview of this debate can be found for instance in Anne Whitehead’s book, Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 20–22.
- 41.
Bowker, ‘The Past and the Internet,’ p. 27.
- 42.
Gregory Crane, ‘History, Memory, Place, and Technology: Plato’s Phaedrus online,’ Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, pp. 38–47, p. 39.
- 43.
The Facebook Company has certain restrictions on what type of photographs can be displayed, usually those that in some way infringe their rules on pornography. This was hotly debated when images of breastfeeding mothers were removed by the site. Facebook has since modified its policy and explains that ‘photos that show a fully exposed breast where the child is not actively engaged in nursing do violate the Facebook Terms.’ https://www.facebook.com/help/340974655932193/.
- 44.
My comments here are based on the pages of my ‘friends’ on Facebook and Instagram. Due to the semi-private nature of these sites, I will not be quoting verbatim from their profile pages. Another option would be to use examples of those who keep their profiles ‘public,’ but as those sites often have a different agenda—promotional sites in one fashion or another—they would probably not be representative of the behaviour of the ‘average’ user.
- 45.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 25.
- 46.
Joanne Garde-Hansen, ‘MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook,’ Save as… Digital Memories, pp. 135–150, p. 135.
- 47.
Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and Reading, ‘Introduction,’ p. 5.
- 48.
Claire Boyle, Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France (Leeds: Legenda, 2007)
- 49.
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 226.
- 50.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson prove this point by providing an analysis of the elements of life writing in online self-presentation in their essay ‘Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation,’ Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), pp. 70–95.
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Gudmundsdottir, G. (2017). Forgetting Online: Self-representation on Social Network Sites. In: Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59864-6_4
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