Life Writing in the Digital Age

Workshop K: seminar room P106 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Heike Schäfer (FU Berlin / Mannheim), Regina Schober (Mannheim), Bettina Soller (Göttingen)

 

1. Katja Kanzler (Dresden), "Adaptation and Self-Expression in Julie/Julia"

2. Nassim Balestrini (Regensburg), "Miranda July: Writing One’s Life, Writing Others' Lives in the Age of Web 2.0"

3. Sladja Blazan (FU Berlin), "'Brownifying' the Web: Guillermo Gómez-Pena's Cartography of Cyberspace"

4. Matthias Kemmer (Würzburg), "'War Does Not Determine Who is Right, Only Who is Left' – Interactivity, Moral Choice and the Functions of Simulated Biography in Bethesda Softworks' Open World Role Playing Game Fallout 3"

5. Johanna Roering (Tübingen), "Soldiers' Blogging: Life Writing in Military Blogs"

6. Brian Schneider (Konstanz), "Live from Iraq: War Blogging in the 21st Century"

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Contact:

Prof. Dr. Katja Kanzler
katja.kanzler@mailbox.tu-dresden.de

PD Dr. Nassim Balestrini
nassim.balestrini@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de

Dr. Sladja Blazan
sladja.blazan@fu-berlin.de

Matthias Kemmer, M.A.
matthias.kemmer@googlemail.com

Dr. des. Johanna Roering
johanna.roering@uni-tuebingen.de

Brian Schneider, M.A.
brian.schneider@uni-konstanz.de

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Digital technologies have changed the way we think about ourselves and relate to others. They have altered the way we conceive of human identity and transformed our practices of communication and representation. Online diaries, blogs, lifecasting, and social networks are just a few of the diverse digital media formats that allow individuals and communities to perform and document biographical and autobiographical acts on the Web. In contrast to more traditional forms of life writing, these online texts can be continuously updated by the author and may easily be appropriated and manipulated by other users. Freed from the time-lag of print publication, life writing on the Internet privileges the moment in which material is created and exchanged. The spatio-temporal immediacy effects and interactive format of web-based (auto)biographical writing allow the genre to emphasize the writer’s participation in the collaborative communication processes of their online communities. By rendering the boundaries between private and public lives as well as between actual and virtual identities increasingly fluid, digital media challenge traditional concepts of self and community, fact and fiction, memory and imagination. In this workshop, we wish to explore the question of how digital media innovations have altered and diversified the possibilities and cultural functions of self-expression and life writing.

We invite scholars from all fields to submit proposals that investigate the following questions:

• How has the use of digital technologies transformed the practices of life writing?
• How do digital media respond to (or ignore) the complexity of human identity?
  Do different digital media formats elicit and negotiate different aspects of identity?
• How can we describe the interactions and cross-fertilizations between virtual and actual subject positions, individuals, and communities?
• How does digital life writing reinforce or undercut the notion of an authentic self, or, conversely, of a performative self? Does it suggest new ways of conceiving race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and other factors of identity formation?
• Which social and political functions does the public display of private experience serve in the context of a digitally based culture of spectacle and surveillance?
• How has the emergence of digital life writing transformed literary culture and changed the production and reception context of printed (auto)biographical texts?
• How has the privileging of processual collaborative formats in digital life writing challenged established notions of authorship, originality, and knowledge?
• Which theoretical or methodological questions are raised by a media technological or media historical approach to life writing?