Fry on Teh Interwebz

[DanaC]

*chuckles* I don't participate myself. I have enough trivia in my life without adopting other peoples'

That said, as a phenomenon I think it's fascinating. I'm currently studying the development of autobiographies and other forms of life-writing. One of the cultural developments that ran alongside that was the idea of the individual. The individual with their own individual soul and their own individual relationship with God drove much of the early (16th and 17th C) lifewriting; most of them concentrated on the individual's spiritual journey. It was a very limited and prescribed form of individuality.

Then this becomes decoupled from faith and the idea of the economic and political individual begins to rise. Even so, it was still a very prescribed form of individuality: individuality as archetype, as lesson, as moral frame. What's intriguing is the entrance of many non-elite voices into this milieu. Generally those non-elite voices are explicitly so: working-class heroes; grammar-school boys come good; the heroic journey from humble beginnings, through trials and tribulations to a successful end point.

Obviously the technological driver behind these developments was the increasing ease of printing and publication. Look around now and there are all kinds of people writing all kinds of auto-biography and memoir. The minutiae of life is there in print, as are deep analyses and expressions of individual experience.

So here we are in the net age and lifewriting has become instant, scrolling, interactive and flexible in nature. The biggest secrets and tiniest details of the most splendid and least regarded lives are all there. Autobiography and life writing, rather than being produced and then read, is instead derived from an ongoing dialogue between author and reader, but with the distinctions between those two roles almost entirely subverted by the medium.