self-representation

Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative. Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives. This book is open access under a CC BY license. (Source: Publisher's blurb)

Lecture with Siri Meyer on self-representation from the Renaissance to social media.

This book explores self-representations in three modes: written, visual and quantitative, and looks
at how these modes of self-representation are used in a digital age. The histories of written and
visual self-representations are well known through lineages of autobiographies, diaries, memoirs
and self-portraits, and have clear descendents in blogs and social media sites like Instagram,
Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Quantitative self-representations also have a long history but have
been less studied as an aesthetic and rhetorical genre. With digital media, the personal tracking of weather, travels, habits and moods is commodified through activity trackers, wearable devices
and apps for lifelogging and productivity.
The book, which will be published as a peer-reviewed, open access and print-on-demand book in
the Palgrave Pivot imprint in October 2014, includes chapters on selfies, on the use of technological and cultural filters, on real-time diaries and on surveillance. For the purpose of this
workshop, the presentation will focus on how we can understand what José van Dijck calls
dataism, the belief in the objectivity of data in constructing representations of identity or behaviour, as a form of paratext to the individual life. Lifelogging is in itself a form of paratextual behaviour, or, seen inversely, the lived life is a form of paratext to the self-representation created on Instagram, in a blog, or through a Fitbit activity tracker. Quantitative self-representations in particular offer an interesting opportunity to think about how the paratextual meets the cyborg, as we strap devices onto our bodies to translate our movements, our heartbeats and even our emotions into quantifiable data about our days.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

The Mirror and the Veil offers a unique perspective on the phenomenon of online personal diaries and blogs. Blending insights from literary criticism, from psychoanalytical theory and from social sciences, Viviane Serfaty identifies the historical roots of self-representational writing in America and studies the original features it has developed on the Internet. She perceptively analyzes the motivations of bloggers and the repercussions their writings may have on themselves and on American society at large. This book will be of interest to specialists in American Studies, to students in literature, communication, psychology and sociology, as well as to anyone endeavoring to understand the new set of practises created by Internet users in America. --Publisher description.

Thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of Blogging provides an accessible study of a now everyday phenomenon and places it in a historical, theoretical and contemporary context. The second edition takes into account the most recent research and developments and provides current analyses of new tools for microblogging and visual blogging. Jill Walker Rettberg discusses the ways blogs are integrated into today’s mainstream social media ecology, where comments and links from Twitter and Facebook may be more important than the network between blogs that was significant five years ago, and questions the shift towards increased commercialization and corporate control of blogs. The new edition also analyses how smart phones with cameras and social media have led a shift towards more visual emphasis in blogs, with photographs and graphics increasingly foregrounded. Authored by a scholar-blogger, this engaging book is packed with examples that show how blogging and related genres are changing media and communication. It gives definitions and explains how blogs work, shows how blogs relate to the historical development of publishing and communication and looks at the ways blogs structure social networks.

In this paper the blog Yawmiyyat 3nis [Diary of a Spinster] written by the Egyptian 3Abeer Sulayman [Abeer Soliman] is conceived as a form of autofiction. In fact, two aspects of online writing are of great importance for Egyptian bloggers. Firstly, blogging has given the Egyptian young people the possibility of sharing their innermost feelings and daily frustration without the fear of identification and humiliation due to their relative anonymity. Secondly, the computer operates as a projective device that allows users to discover and create different versions of themselves (Sorapure, 2003). Thus, blog writing facilitates autobiographic writing but at the same time turns daily life into fiction. The analysis of Abeer Soliman’s blog aims to show how the computer has an impact on the way diaries are written. On a structural level, I will highlight the presence of distinct literary features that are enhanced by the medium: the use of visual/audio components, the interaction with readers, and the presence of links. All these elements are essential for the understanding of Abeer’s self-representation. As for genre classification, I will show how Abeer uses her diary to talk about unspoken subjects in Egypt and to involve her readers in a challenging game of interpretations regarding the hybrid status of the blog. The study reveals that Abeer’s self-presentation in her blog aims to change the common beliefs regarding unmarried women over the age of thirty in Egypt. Also, linking fictional stories to her narrative “I” is a way to claim that sexual harassment, intimidation, rejection on the grounds of one’s marital status affect every Egyptian woman on a daily basis, regardless of their economic, intellectual and social status.