29 - The machines that write us: Social media and the evolution of the autobiographical impulse

Summary

Among those interested in the study of autobiography, it has become a truism, or perhaps even a cliché, to state that the need to tell one's own story is a universal one, at least on this planet. The form and nature of this story is of course up for debate given the myriad ways in which humanity has represented individual experience over the course of millennia. Indeed, the very term ‘story’ should be framed by very large quotation marks given its associations with linearity and the primacy given to the individualised narrator. One person's ‘story’ could very well be another's random scribble, just as anonymous mutterings and whispers passed from one generation to the next can evolve into complex narrations of personal and collective experience.

Technically, of course, the term autobiography is not only historically contingent but also frequently employed as an arguably ahistorical representative of the ‘structure of feeling’ associated with the Enlightenment and modern condition. This is particularly the case of the archetypical Renaissance ‘man’ that privileges the self-possessed individual who literally thinks him or herself into a state of being. Descartes is an obvious representative figure, notably in terms of being the figurehead for the enlightened mind and what is eventually to become the modern sensibility. Reaching back even further in time is the elevation of St. Augustine, who is granted a kind of ‘proto-modern’ status by being associated with the very first rumblings of what we now know as the literary genre of autobiography. ‘Augustine’, writes Arthur Kroker, ‘might rightly be described as the first citizen of the modern world’ whose Confessions function as a kind of founding exemplar of ‘directly apprehended experience of the direct deliverance of will, nature and consciousness’ (Kroker and Cook 1986, 37). James Olney follows suit by writing that ‘the entire justification, validation, necessity, and indeed exemplary instance of writing one's life, of finding the words that signify the self and its history, are offered to us for the first time … in the Confessions’ (Olney 1998, 2). While we can certainly debate such claims, what is important to note here is not who was the world's first autobiographer but rather what such claims reveal about perceptions of change and departure.