New Sites of Autobiographical Production: Autoblography

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, cyberspace has integrated our lives in so many different ways. It is the source of instantaneous information: we read, hear, and watch the ever-changing news cycle, flipping through news channels, eyewitness reports, and individual opinions from every part of the world. It is where popular culture takes place: we read stories, watch films and TV videos, listen to music, and talk about our cultural experiences. It is where much of the social exchanges take place (for many people, it is where all of their social exchanges take place): Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Internet gaming, Blogspot, and a myriad of similar sites provide unprecedented opportunities to construct communication lines between different cultures, generations, genders, and societal groups. In other words, for many, the ever-expanding cyber universe has become a place where a significant part of their living reality takes place.

From the identity studies point of view, cyberspace has truly revolutionized – and continues to do so – both our understanding of selfhood and the ways in which we perform our individual identities on a daily basis. The questions behind cyber identity are so many and so complex that one needs to navigate through all available theories on human subjectivity to even begin unwrapping the implications of cyber-living on general human experience. Avatars, gaming personalities, profiles on dating sites, blogs, twits, chat rooms, and personal webpages such as Facebook provide limitless prospects to create multiple – virtual – versions of our selves. Modern technology offers every one of us with a computer and Internet access a series of reincarnations in cyberspace, and ways to construct virtual bodies however we want and however we want others to see us. Sherry Turkle wrote about contemporary identity-making experiments that the Internet provided a medium for: