24.1.arthur

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

1/20

Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online

Paul Longley Arthur

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer

2009, pp. 74-92 (Article)

Published by The Autobiography Society

DOI: 10.1353/abs.2009.0012

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by University of the Philippines - Diliman at 03/17/11 5:33AM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/abs/summary/v024/24.1.arthur.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/abs/summary/v024/24.1.arthur.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/abs/summary/v024/24.1.arthur.html

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

2/20

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

3/20

75Digital Biography

awareness o and engagement with concepts o sel and identity;truth and fction; memory and imagination; reality and abrication;public and private; and, entangled with all o these, autobiographyand biography. This paper identifes current digital developmentsand trends that are inuencing the production o lives and identitiesonline in order to speculate on the digital uture o biography.

Biography, the MacquarieDictionary tells us, is a writtenaccount o a persons lie (Biography). While some critics andpractitioners have called or this defnition to be updated and ex-panded beyond the written text to include visual media such as flm,television, video and photography (see Hamilton, 2, 83, 280, and291), others, taking this as a given, have automatically gone ahead

and incorporated these media in their understanding o the term.1However, with the extraordinarily rapid rise o online orms andopportunities over the past decade, the pressure to consider this is-sue o defnition has been overtaken by much bigger questions andevents. Biography has ound itsel caught up in a tide o transorma-tional technologies and genres that are likely to change not only thecharacter o biography, but also our understanding o undamentalconcepts that help us to make sense o our lives, including sel,

individuality, identity, and truth. At the same time, theseevents also remind us that such terms have by no means had fxed orclear meanings in the past and that biography, especially in the latterpart o the twentieth century, has had a dynamic existenceadaptingto social and political change, migrat[ing] across the genresand,in the process, insistently questioning such concepts and exposingtheir instability (251). In act, as John Zuern reminds us, the I oautobiography and memoir, and even the third person subject o

biography, has never been anything but virtual (xi). Nevertheless,critics who have entered the arena o digital biography generallyagree that the intensity, speed, and scale o the digital revolution aresuch that resh approaches are necessary. With a ocus on autobio-graphy and portraiture, Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith have arguedor narratively-based theories to be re-considered to accommodatepresentations across multiple media, including virtual reality (qtd.in Whitlock and Poletti viii).2 In my recent article, Digital Fabric,Narrative Threads: Patchwork Designs on History, I propose anapproach that oregrounds the materiality o web-based biographyand history, through the metaphor o quilting. In their introductionto the issue oBiography entitled Autographics, Gillian Whitlockand Anna Poletti draw attention to the rapidly changing visual andtextual cultures o autobiography. Shiting the emphasis rom textualto graphic lie narrative, they call or a resh approach that casts

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

4/20

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies76

its net more widely and pays attention to the sight, the sounds, theeel o the new orms (v).

In 2003, in response to the remarkable expansion o online liewriting over the previous seven years, the pioneering Online Livesissue o the journal Biography was published. With an emphasis onboth continuities and dierences in relation to traditional texts, theessays were threaded through with key themes in the emerging feldo digital biography, including temporality, subjectivity, and theunstable polarity o private and public space (Zuern vii).

A crucial dierence between traditional biographiesincludingflm and televisionand peoples lives represented in the onlinespace is that online identities are easily manipulated at any time by

the individual subject or by others. There is no doubt that even thissingle eature, the ability to manage online content at will, is chang-ing the way we see ourselves and each other.Along with the oodo other enabling tools that the digital world brings, this capacity tomanage identity with increasing ease will certainly have an impacton the conventional practices o all orms o lie writing, includingbiography. The act that millions o complex social identities nowourish in online environments is a compelling reason or traditional

biographical studies to study and assess the new developments. Someo them are considered merely games in the past, and some emergerom locations that are so amiliar, so close to home, that theirpenetration into our worlds and their potential to have a direct impacton how we experience our everyday lives has, in many cases, takenus by surprise. Whether they are perceived as exciting or threaten-ing, these innovations open up opportunities or new biographicalorms and understandings to emerge. The undamental driver o all

biographical study has thus ar remained relatively unchanged amidstan unprecedentedly volatile environment o prolierating genres andworlds available or the production o identity. Elizabeth Podniekssummarizes the contemporary situation well: The technologicalinnovations oered by the Internet stimulate, enhance and multiplythe means or sel-expression, but they do not inherently changethe motivations or lie writing, which has arguably always been tocommunicate and connect not only with our own disparate selvesbut also with those o others (Hit Sluts 23).3

Will biography go through a more radical change as it gets ur-ther enmeshed in the online environment? Or will the biographicalproject remain undamentally the same regardless o changes inmedium or genre? I would argue that the new digital opportunitiesor representing lives online will change our conception o the bio-graphical subject, o the biographer, and o biography in ways that wecannot yet understand. However, we can begin by observing how the

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

5/20

77Digital Biography

cyberworld, which is already teeming with lie, operates. Many o thelives we can see there are actually second lives, abricated identities.4One could say, in act, that the whole realm o cyberbiography islike a second lie in relation to the traditional feld o biography.

Even those people who do not live second or alternate lives onlineare fnding that their lives gain new dimensions and take on a newcomplexity because o the growing interrelationship o humans withtechnologies that augment our abilities. Various kinds o memory en-hancement are particularly relevant to the topic o this paper. Cyborgantasies o implanted computer chips that give us extra memory seemnot so distant and also perhaps not so rightening, when one consid-ers how reliant most people already are on mobile devices, especially

mobile phones. These are now much more than basic communicationdevices. Whereas once it seemed a miracle to be able to speak withone another wirelessly, smartphones now store personal inormationand synchronize this with computers silently and invisibly. They canalso oer up inormation about a locationthey see things thathumans can never see.5 These phones may have become our mosttrusted associates, but they can also become our enemies: Thetrust that we invest in our mobile phones, writes one commenta-

tor, makes them utterly convincing witnesses against us (Yager).While the inormation stored is likely to be in the category o datarather than biography, the increasing capacity to store photos, vid-eos, and reective texts such as diaries is undoubtedly giving phonesthe potential to cross the line. Like our personal computers, phonesare becoming so smart that they hold a great deal o sensitive,private inormation about our personalities and habits, inormationwe would never have dreamed o carrying around in our pockets in

the past. In a very real sense, these devices arebiography machines.Its handy to carry a digital biography that could make you whole iyou should ever suer total amnesia, the same observer points out,but perhaps some things are best committed to wet memory, despitethe risk (Yager).. Later in this paper I discuss the balance betweenpersonal exposure and privacya balance that younger digital na-tives keep shiting and which will become increasingly importantor biography.6

In the quickly changing, globalized society in which we live, wemay take great comort in knowing that an electronic device can opena communication channel to riends and relatives rom practicallyanywhere in the world. But my instincts tell me that it is risky todeer increasingly to digital devices to run our lives. I was shockedto learn o the current Companions project. Led by the Universityo Shefeld with a consortium o ourteen partners rom Europe andthe US, and with thirteen-million Euro unding through the European

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

6/20


Commission, this interdisciplinary research program uses advancedtechnologies to create persistent agents (Companions). These aredescribed as personal Companions that over a long period o timedevelop a relationship with their owners, mainly through speech, butalso via touch screens and sensors. They are like cyber-pets but muchmore than that. They are sensitive to the needs o, and relationshipwith, the single owner (Companions). And yet, conusingly, theembodiment o a Companion is relatively unimportant: it could bea screen head, a mobile phone, or some simple object, easy to carryabout, like a handbag (Companions). The envisaged relationship isambitiously deep: a Companion becomes, in a precise sense, part othe users memory on the web, essentially their memory o themselves

and their lie events (Companions). This means that a key roleor the Companion, and one that is highly innovative, is to producea orm o biography through non-human oral interviewing: Theoriginality here is the use o conversation as a tool o reminiscenceor users who will already have much o their lies data in digitalorm, such as images, texts and videos. The Companion is there togive that data a narrative orm, a lie story, or the beneft o the userand their successors (Companions).

New media and new technologies may not yet threaten the roleo the biographer or oral historian on a large scale, but this is oneproject that certainly demands attention and interpretation by thosewho are interested in the study o lives. Should these Companions beseen as a threat or a valuable new resource or biography? Underlyingthis question is, once again, the need to distinguish between the ac-cumulation o data and the conscious act o organizing it and givingit shape that is at the heart o biography.

O most concern is the potential impoverishment o biography.The Companions project is driven by the underlying assumptionthat a lie narrative can be ormed simply by collecting and storinginormation such as conversations, diary entries, photos, videos,maps, and physical movements in ways that can be perormed, atcommand, by this rudimentary digital accomplice. What it does notaccount or is the complexity o the shaping process that crats ac-cumulated data into a lie story. Nor does it account or the poweruleects on the selection process o memory, mood, and context thatis at the heart o all narratives o sel, whether we tell them to ourbiographers, our riends and amilies, or ourselves. Further, it doesnot acknowledge the ongoing reective aspect o sel-ashioningthat, as Paul John Eakin puts it, is oriented as much to the presentand uture as to the past (xi). Because memory itsel is ashioned,the Companion would not be much improved even i somehow it haddirect access to memories. As Laurence J. Kirmayer explains, memory

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

7/20

79Digital Biography

is anything but a photographic record o experience. Rather, it isa roadway ull o potholes, badly in need o repair, worked on dayand night by revisionist crews. . . . we readily engage in imaginativeelaboration and conabulation and, once we have done this, thebare bones memory is lost orever within the animated story wehave constructed (176). Biographers work by animating throughnarrative; the narrative overlays a temporal structure and sequence(see Friedman). No digital companion, however sophisticated, cando this.

A theme that runs through this paper is that a uture digital biog-raphy should not lose sight o the motive or and history o recordinglives as biographyto preserve, memorialize, celebrate, and share lie

experiences. Nor should digital biography, as it develops, be mainlydirected by technological innovation. However, in order to open upthe feld o biography to new inuences and possibilities, it will benecessary to think beyond traditional orms. The uture biographerwill have unprecedented opportunities to crat lives in new ways,using technologies and genres that would seem very unamiliar totodays writers and readers.

This paper continues by considering urther uses o the term

digital biography that relate to online identity in a dierent waythrough the provision o identity management services. It later turnsto potential uture genres as well as current examples that lead theway and provide a glimpse o what may lie ahead. Finally, it exploresthe larger issue o how in undamental ways technology impacts ourpersonal, virtual, and collective identities, all o which are centrallyimportant to the study o lives as biography.

Digital Biography Services

Although the digital biography contains a host o detailsabout a person, it captures a distorted persona, one who isconstructed by a variety o external details.

Daniel J. Solove

To most people it is clear what biography is: a biography presents asubstantive narrative o a lie. But in the online environment the termdigital biography has a range o usages, some closely related to,and others only loosely connected to, the conventional understandingo biography. A labyrinthine search on the Internet brought me intocontact with all sorts o reerences to digital biography. A handulstood out as interesting and relevant to a broader discussion o schol-arly biography. Some o these I have already reerred to; however, I

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

8/20


discovered that or the most part the inormation I ound led to paidservices ranging rom image consultants to genealogists.

In 1995, when Carolyn Burke launched diary.carolyn.orgre-garded as the worlds frst online diaryit was easy to describe thevery limited extent o biography-related activities online. Eight yearslater, in 2003, when the topic was still very new, the journal Biographydevoted a ull issue to Online Lives,7 providing an important his-torical record o the new virtual space or biographical representation.Then, as Web 2.0 took hold in 2004, everything seemed to changequite suddenly. Web 2.0 ushered in the second incarnation o the web.Its eect can be summarized in these terms: while the Internet hadbeen a channel primarily or communication o inormation, Web

2.0 introduced standards and technologies or inormation sharingthat enabled it to shit towards acilitating dynamic interaction andexchange between individuals or communities, rather than simplyproviding or static inormation retrieval. Web 2.0 underpins socialnetworking sites and a whole range o other dynamic blog and wikiservices, and it generally acilitates user-generated content. In otherwords, instead o simply accessing the Internet, users could enterit,present themselves (however they wished), and engage directly with

other users.Online image is now everythingat least that is the case accord-

ing to David Petherick, business consultant, who has a trademark onthe Digital Biographer name. Most people can not be objectivewhen describing themselvesthats why so many autobiographiesare unreadable, a heading insists (Petherick). The service oered isa virtual makeover o ones online identity, with the goal o ensuringthat this ashioned identity (a combination o sales pitch, a personal

presentation, a business card, a brochure, a personal statement, a listo recommendations, a mini web-site, and a wave rom across theroom) conveys the desired image. In a recent BBC documentary thateatured Petherick, the message was clear: with image managementonline, other orms o advertising may be wasted or even work againstthe online identity (Cellan-Jones). Petherick does not write aboutpeoplehe does not produce the sort o biography we are amiliarwith. Rather, he crats new and multiple identities or people, bring-ing out the aspects they want to oer online. There is great demandor this kind o service. While the products may seem shallow andcontrived, they nevertheless remind us that there is a signifcantcomponent o spin and manipulation in any representation o alie, regardless o how authentic or authorized or even defni-tive it may claim to be. Further, a person may potentially take onthe qualities o the chosen imagethe lie may ollow the fction.

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

9/20

81Digital Biography

Many competing Internet-based businesses advertise services orcapturing and preserving amily memories or a ee. Such businessestypically specialize in the compilation o existing photographs (scan-ning, sometimes restoring, adding captions, and printinggivingshape to and celebrating the amily archive rather than leaving it asa random or unordered collection). Some services include oral videointerviews in the home, with questions generated in relation to aselection o photographs or other personal memorabilia. Servicessuch as biowriters.NET have gone even urther, engaging consultantbiographers to write a biography o up to 25,000 words (biowrit-ers.NET, Premier).8 Each book contains a proessionally writtenbiography, complete with ull-color photo montages and a CD o

avorite songs, photos and other mementos. The entire process cantake as little as two months. Every project begins with a two-hundredword questionnaire relating to twelve lie chapters. Our servicemakes the biography process easy, the ounder, Suzanne Warden,claimed. (biowriters.NET, Homepage, 28 Sep. 2008). While in-stant biographies such as these are not necessarily in digital orm, itis the ease o inormation exchange via digital technologies that hasenabled this development. Most amily records never make it to an

archive; when they do they tend to be locked away and sometimesorgotten or a very long time, i not orever. In this context, all othese online services can play an important role because they areempowering ordinary people to celebrate their amily histories andcommunicate them more widely. Other more popular services, suchas Ancestry.com, put genealogical inormation and research tools inthe hands o the user.

Pethericks title as Digital Biographer is intriguing or a number

o reasons. One is that this potential or identity makeover, linkedwith the biographer, reminds us o how much power is vested in andresponsibility is accorded to all biographers, whatever medium theychoose. It reminds us that they do shape their subjects livesotenwith controversial results. Another issue researching the term revealsis that the digital sphere is ull o identities in various states o cre-ation. But this, too, is nothing new. It is just another example o theact that we naturally show dierent aces to the world, in accordancewith the identity we want to project at any given time. Thus, digitalmakeovers amount to a dierent packaging o what biographersand historians have always knownthat identities, like languageitsel, are infnitely changeable and plural. In the digital environmentthis has simply become glaringly obvious. As ar back as 1970, Ro-land Barthes imagined the ideal text in terms that can be read asprophetic o the Internet and especially o digital identities: In thisideal text, he wrote in a well-known passage rom the beginning o

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

10/20


S/Z, the networks are many and interact, without any one o thembeing able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy o signifers, not astructure o signifeds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gainaccess to it by several entrances, none o which can be authoritativelydeclared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as ar asthe eye can reach, they are indeterminable (meaning here is neversubject to a principle o determination, unless by throwing dice); thesystems o meaning can take over this absolutely plural text . . . basedas it is on the infnity o language (56).

New Genres for Biography Online

At this moment there are ew models to look to or an indication othe digital uture o the kind o biography that is currently publishedin book orm. Genres, like brands, are successul only when they at-tract large numbers o ollowers. Not only are there no commonlyidentifed genres or biography in the digital environment, but asHamilton discusses, isolated examples tend to shed light on the re-strictions o experimental genres as much as they oer glimpses o apromising uture (24250).

Most scholars would agree that there need to be commonalitiesbetween biography in old and new media. The purpose o biographywill surely continue to provide an account o a persons lie, and bi-ographers will still want their stories, whatever orm they may takeand through whatever lens they are fltered, to be based on reliableevidence and to provide a rich and rewarding experience or theiraudiences. And yet, the new biography also needs to be open tochange, to make best use o the hypermedia online environment. Inthis environment, digital aesthetic with an emphasis on visual com-

munication is already evolving (Arthur 113; Staley 3). This situationprovides an opportunity to capture wide interest through its multi-layered visual and aural dimensions. Perhaps more importantly, usershave developed sophisticated new media literacies. They are readingonline with dexterity and have learned to expect highly interactiveand engaging content. As the Internet matures and the digital na-tives start to dominate, content creators will be orced to adapt touser demands. Because biography is currently very popular and has

appeal ar beyond academic circles, in the online environment it iswell positioned to attract even wider audiences. How will biographyadapt?

One possible uture or biography is exemplifed by the innovativeonline exhibition George Washington: A National Treasure, which isramed around an interactive image o the president. The site bringstogether inormation and documentation about the amous portrait

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

11/20

83Digital Biography

painted by Gilbert Stuart in the last year o Washingtons presidencyin 1796 and biographical records o Washington himsel and thebroader social context o the time in which he lived.9 There are threelenses through which to view the workSymbolic, Biographic,and Artistic. The user selects a hotspot that is labeled with numbers112 on a digitized version o the painting. Hotspots include tableleg, clothing, sword, dark clouds, and portico among manyothers: these reer to elements in the composition o the painting.Once selected, that portion o the painting zooms in closer and thedetail flls the right-hand rame. In the let rame is one o the in-terpretations (Symbolic, Biographic, or Artistic). The user can clickto select the alternatives. The next button takes the user to the

sequentially numbered hotspot and related item and interpretations,without needing to return to the ull portrait view. These are careullythought through navigation options that are eective rom a usabilityand design perspective.

The portrait o Washington is accompanied by a history o re-lated objects, practices, historical moments, painterly techniques,biographical details o Washington and the painter, together withcareully scanned or photographed records o miscellaneous related

items that are highly evocative, such as a drat handwritten arewellspeech or an image o the commemorative button worn at Washing-tons inauguration in 1789. There is educational interpretation or ageneral audience (Some think that Washington is pointing towardsthe uture, oreseeing bright prospects or his nation. Others believethat Washington is saying arewell [1. Gesture]). For specialistaudiences there are links to scanned documents such as the handwrit-ten arewell speech.

In the context o the current discussion, this example is particularlyilluminating. It demonstrates how the digital environment uses itsexiblity to present multiple perspectives alongside relatively exten-sive documentation o a lie at the same time as it privileges visualcommunication by raming the work around a major portrait. GeorgeWashington: A National Treasure also shows how this kind o digitalbiographical product can be highly accessible and appeal to diverseaudiences who can choose their levels o involvement. O the manyexperimental interactive texts I have investigated, this example isone o the simplest to use. However, the simplicity o use cleverlybelies the rich resource o text, images, degree o detail, and angleso interpretation available.

The only small point o criticism I would make is that there are nodates given or this exhibitionneither at this interactive website ex-hibit nor through the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallerys website,which reers to a touring version. The only indication is in an online

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

12/20


bookshop where there is a catalogue or sale that has a publicationdate o 2004 (George Washington). This is simply a slip-up, a mistake,nothing more. But this happens regularly in the online world. Webpages that one views are almost always the very latest versionstheyhave a lie that is always up to the minute and practically timeless.It is difcult to see history through this undamentally ahistorical,always newly ramed, window.

While biography in book orm has not migrated and evolved toadapt to the online environment, the most respected print-basedreerence works or the study o lives already have. The OxordDictionary o National Biography (http://www.oxorddnb.com), theAmerican National Biography (http://www.anb.org) and the Australian

Dictionary o Biography (http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au) have allmoved to an online ormat and rendered the print version no longerauthoritative. For the most up-to-date inormation, users now consultthe constantly improved digital versions o these reerence works.They are also experimenting with pooling their resources throughdirect hyperlinks so that users can ollow a lead rom one resourceto another to access additional contextual inormation. This meansthat one biographical entry can link directly to related biographical

entries in the partner database.Within this relatively closed system (a selection o partner organi-

zations working together) it is possible to direct users to appropriateinormation. However, biographical inormation in general is ex-tremely difcult to mark up in such a way as to make it accessibleand interpretable by computers. Biographical inormation poses suchproblems or simple technical reasons. The Electronic Cultural AtlasInitiatives (ECAI) special project Bringing Lives to Light: Biography

in Context oers an explanation and is ormulating a solution. Inthe project proposal, the authors explain that there are archival stan-dards or digital reerencing o peoples names but not the signifcantaspects o their lives. There are no widely embraced standards orencoding the things people do in their lives. Libraries routinely markup records to characterize and identiy livesborn here, marriedthere, died then, or examplebut these basic acts do not provide astrong oundation or a more complex and interconnected depictiono lives online. The ECAI project leaders oresee a time when cleversotware will trawl the web using specialist reerence fnding agentsto produce the context or a lie based on and extrapolating romwhat may be minimal existing evidence. In their view, it will rely onbiographical records giving more inormation about context in thefrst place. As an example, the writers o the project narrative giveus: Born in 1881, Born in Moscow, Born in Moscow in 1881,Born to Grigorii and Olga Goldberg at 32 Miasnitzskaia, Moscow,

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

13/20

85Digital Biography

on August 19, 1881. These are all completely dierent descriptionsthat relate to a structured series o more or less complete and complexevents, each event represented by a more or less complete our-acettuple composed o an action (WHAT) in time (WHEN) in a place(WHERE) in relation to others (WHO) (University o Caliornia,Berkeley, and Partners).As the authors explain, It is understandingthe circumstances o peoples actions that illuminates their lives, butthere is a signifcant gap in the inrastructure developed by libraries,museums, and publishers in this area.10

How Technology is Changing Identity

As I spread mysel around over the network, updating myFacebook prole, commenting on MySpace, fying throughSecond Lie, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar andposting photos and videos and audio I am nding a new wayto be Bill Thompson. I wonder what hell be like?

Bill Thompson

Online expression and communication are becoming increasingly

personal, and also very public. According to Nancy K. Miller, therise o the dot.com culture is responsible or what she calls theparoxysm o personal exposure, whereby millions o people setup blogs, personal home pages, and online diaries o one sort or an-other, making the private public (421). Services such as Facebookand MySpace have had an extraordinarily powerul role to play inthat they have opened up this acility or online sel-exposure andsel-construction to everyone with access to a computer connected

to the Internet. There continues to be a shiting balance betweenpersonal exposure and privacy. For the skeptics, the Orwellian visiono suppressed identity in an environment o overarching control andsurveillance has contemporary resonance. And yet, or otherses-pecially younger peoplethe very same technology opens avenuesor rich and meaningul interconnections that would not otherwisebe possible. Ater all, rom one perspective, power is in the hands othe individualI can decide what I post on my blog, how I describemysel proessionally; I can de-couple my day-to-day personality rommy adopted persona in a game or a social networkin other words,it is up to me how I manage my identity. But rom another, technol-ogy has a grip on an individuals identity that can never be released.Identity management is sometimes out o the hands o the individualand may even be beyond the likes o David Petherick because apersons online portrait can be built up rom bits and pieces, remnantso others reports and impressions, together with other out-o-date

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

14/20


or misleading inormation. Daniel J. Solove puts it beautiully in hisbook The Digital Person, in which he writes about the aggregationeect in these terms: The digital revolution has enabled inorma-tion to be easily amassed and combined. Even inormation that issuperfcial or incomplete can be quite useul in obtaining more dataabout individuals. Inormation breeds inormation. . . . Similar to aSeurat painting, where a multitude o dots juxtaposed together orma picture, bits o inormation when aggregated paint a portrait o aperson (44).

The composite identity so ormed, however, is likely to be out othe subjects control. There is no point in even trying to dispute orremove an entry that pops up on Google or Yahoo, or example. In

response to the threat o long-term personal over-exposure, there arenow specialists working in a feld called de-identifcation. LatanyaSweeney, who directs the Laboratory or International Data Privacyat Carnegie Mellon University, works to protect confdentiality bydesigning anonymizing sotware, deidentifers, and other smartalgorithms. These are all terms that allude to the worst o the dehu-manizing tendencies o the Orwellian technological apparatus, thosethat work against individuality and, by extension, the possibility o

biography. One deidentifer program melds images o real acesrom surveillance ootage to create composites that would only beunravelled to reveal the actual aces i legally authorized (Walter7475).

Our concept o social identity needs to expand to include a new,distributed kind o sel given orm in online environments. Thompsonwrites, our modern conception o privacy and o the nature o theindividual is a product o the industrial age that is now passing, so

it should not surprise us that we are fnding new ways o construct-ing an identity online. In this changing environment it is becomingmore difcult to describe social identity as singular because peopleare interacting increasingly in online and virtual relationships, andalso more globally. For many people, the high-street shop has beenreplaced by an online merchant thousands o kilometers away. Andyet, those same people may have also developed very close relation-ships with relative strangers who they might have not met in personbut chat with every day onlinein a spirit o intimacy in anonymity(McNeill 39).39).

In the online sphere, people thrive on multiple identities. Howcould a biographer proess to know these many acades o a character?How could she or he even hope to access them? What other newbarriers are put up in the digital realm? The avatars o Second Lie,the anonymous bloggers, the Facebookers with their code-riddledcommunication amongst oten tenuously linked riends are all

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

15/20

87Digital Biography

part o this oten inaccessible culture. Second Lie alone creates awhole new world where the boundaries between antasy and realityare all but dissolved. In act in Paul Carr and Graham Ponds TheUnocial Tourists Guide to Second Lie, the reader is taken into avirtual world with the same pragmatic advice and support that onewould expect rom a Lonely Planet guidebook to another country.This other world is so real that Second Lie players have met andmarried in-world and there have been cases o Second Lie infdeli-ties that have led to real-lie divorce proceedings. As the WeekendAustralian newspaper reported in November 2008, a couple havedivorced ater the husband was caught having a virtual aair witha emale character (Bruxelles 17). In this context, the old debates

about act and fction, truth and imagination, come to lie in new andstartling ways. Perhaps the most perplexing and conusing situationacing uture biographers will be that people are deliberately takingon radically dierent personas that sometimes bear no resemblanceto their everyday counterpart, not even physically.

The antasy o the online world o Second Lie, which has millionso users, is also a very real success story in the mainstream commercialsense. In-world virtual events include serious university study and

lielike classrooms, simulcast music concerts by bands, and exclusivelaunches and premieres by the likes o 20th Century Fox (Schaer 198).Regular users see a blurry line between their original person and theiravatar rather than a clear-cut distinction between the separate selves.Imagine being given a licence [sic] to completely reinvent yourselwith a new name, a new body and even a new personality. We allhave days when that might seem like an appealing idea (198). All themore conusing or a biographer. But can we seriously look to worlds

such as Second Lie to discover peoples personalities? Ater all, inSecond Lie your avatar can be gorgeous and clad in computerisedcouture while teleporting or ying around a sort o utopia, ree romworldly constraints (199).

Ultimately autobiography online may be much more straightor-ward than biography. The lieloggers have already begun to pursuea dream o personal documentation to its extreme. Lielogging is thepractice o recording and storing, as ar as possible, all the inormationo your lieevery conversation, every phone call, every email, everyweb page visited, everything you did or every minute o every day(Dent). An average hard drive will store a whole lie, claims GeorgeBell, a seventy-three-year-old, pioneering lielogger and MicrosotResearch computer analyst. In his vision o lielogging, the data hisequipment collects will help us with our own imperect memoriesand measure heart rate and other bodily unctions to create extensivemedical records over time (Dent). This eectively takes responsibility

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

16/20


or collecting the materials or our own auto/biographies. But there areobvious risks. Formats change over time and some inormation mayone day become unreadable and obsolete. This is a risk with any sorto digital data. Perhaps more importantly, the lieloggers themselveswill certainly miss out on some o the potential o their lives and, inan eort to document minutiae, may entirely miss great opportuni-ties. In considering lielogging in the context o autobiography, weare reminded sharply again that accumulated data does not in itselamount to a representation o a lie. For that we need the cratingrole o the traditional literary biographer/autobiographer, turning lieinto art, creating something whole and beautiul out o the rag andbone shop o lie (Yeats 40).

Conclusion

At this stage, beyond the sphere o online reerence works such asdictionaries o biography and encyclopedias, biography continues tobe grounded in the amiliar printed book orm. This paper shows thatwhile the ocus o academic study has remained frmly on print-basedbiographical genres, the dynamic online world o the Internet is start-ing to spawn new conceptions o biography at the same time as compli-cating amiliar notions o personal and social identity (Arthur). Thesecomplex actors will impact on the digital uture o biography.

I write rom the perspective o someone who is trained in andrespects traditional historical research techniques. I also enjoy usingcomputers and have a passion or screen culture, interactive media,and new technology. It does not matter where one looksto novelwriting, business strategy, sustainable resource allocation, or any otherfeld o activitythe technology now within most peoples reach is

providing a toolkit to think and do things dierently. In universitiesthe latest teaching rooms now resemble collaborative creative mediastudios. Industries and government are aiming at exible workingenvironments supported by mobile communications technology, ree-ing employees to think dierently, more independently and creatively.The result is that the new conditions enabled by communicationstechnologies are owing through all aspects o our lives, changingthe environments in which people live as well as the skills they need

to communicate, interpret, and work.This will be a ascinating time or uture biographers and historians

to document when they look back and wonder when social identityonline became a ocus o serious academic studythe tipping pointor seminal moment, as Cathrin Schaer writes (199). Technologywill no doubt take us in entirely new and unexpected directions.As Camille Dodero ponders, Humans might someday be able to

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

17/20

89Digital Biography

up-load their memories, their personalities, their entire lives, intotheir avatars. They might be able to program them to live and breatheand interact or all eternity inside Second Lie. Humanitys great questor immortality might fnally be solved (qtd. in Schaer 200).

Even i this is the case, ultimately we still need biographersandperhaps we will need them more than ever.

The Australian National University

Notes

1. The Biography television channel is an example o the au-tomatic expansion o the term biography beyond writing. New

terms signaling biographys multi-media nature include psychobi-ography, pathography, biopic, technobiography, autoble,and autographics.

2. Eakin promotes a narrative-based approach.3. Eakin makes a related point (74).4. Second Liers inhabit a parallel geographical universe thatSecond Liers inhabit a parallel geographical universe that

can be mapped, like the real world (Carr and Pond 30).5. In Perth, Australia, mobile devices now tune in to invisible

interactive trailsprompting the user to download ree historicalinormation (Oen).

6. Digital natives is the term commonly used or the generationthat has been born into and is entirely at home with digital technolo-gies.

7. For related discussion, see Podnieks Hit Sluts and WebDiaries, and Seraty.

8. I was surprised to read in the very fne print that biowriters.NET

paid writers only $1700 and that they expected the biography to bewritten in sixty hours. See biowriters.NET, Independent.9. This example ollows the model o Shelley Jacksons acclaimed

hypertext novel, My Body: A Wunderkammer.10. The protocols are being testedon the Emma Goldman Papers,

Berkeley, and the collections o the Shoah Foundation or VisualHistory and Education.

Works CitedArthur, Paul. Digital Fabric, Narrative Threads: Patchwork Designs

on History. Interdisciplinary Humanities 25.2 (2008): 10620.Print.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill andWang, 1974. Print.

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

18/20


Biography. Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus Online. Macmil-lan Publishers Australia, 2010. Web. 19 May 2010. .

biowriters.NET. Homepage. English-Warden, Inc., n.d. Web. 28Sep. 2008.

---. Homepage. English-Warden, Inc., 2005. Web. 13 Nov. 2009.---. biowriters.NET Independent Contractors Agreement. English-

Warden, Inc., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2009.---. The biowriters.NET Premier Biography. English-Warden, Inc.,

n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2009.Bruxelles, Simone de. Virtual Betrayal Leads to Divorce. Weekend

Australian 1516 Nov. 2008: 17. Print.

Carr, Paul, and Graham Pond. The Unocial Tourists Guide toSecond Lie. New York: St Martins/Grifn, 2007.

Cellan-Jones, Rory. Meet the Digital Biographer. BBC News. BBC,16 Jul. 2007. Web. 26 Jun. 2008. .

Companions Project Newsletter 1. Companions: Intelligent Per-sistent Personalised Multimodal Interaces with the Internet. Eu-ropean Commission Sixth Framework Programme-Companions

Project, Jan. 2008. Web. 2 Apr. 2008. .

Dent, Nick. yiA Beginners Guide to the Modern World: Lielog-ging. The AgeGood Weekend 27 Jan. 2007: Upront eature.Print.

Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identityin Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008. Print.

Friedman, William J. Memory or the Time o Past Events. Psycho-

logical Bulletin 113.1 (1993): 4466. Print.George Washington: A National Treasure. Smithsonian NationalPortrait Gallery, n. d. Web. 13 Nov. 2009. .

Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brie History. Cambridge: HarvardUP, 2007. Print.

Jackson, Shelley. My Body: A Wunderkammer. Alt-X Online Network,1997. Web. 26 Jun. 2008. .

Kirmayer, Laurence J. Landscapes o Memory: Trauma, Narrative,and Dissociation. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma andMemory. Ed. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. New York: Rout-ledge, 1996. 17398. Print.

McNeill, Laurie. Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary onthe Internet. Biography 26.1 (Winter 2003): 2447. Print.

Miller, Nancy K. But Enough About Me, What Do You Think o MyMemoir? Yale Journal o Criticism 13.2 (2000): 42136. Print.

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

19/20

91Digital Biography

Oen, Richard. World First as Perths Heritage Tourism Moves intothe 21st Century. Heritage Perth News and Events. Heritage Perth,27 May 2008. Web. 26 Jun. 2008. .

Petherick, David. Services. Digital BiographerTM: Insight + Tips onBeing Visible, Credible, Legible, and Protable Online Using SocialMedia. Digital BiographerTM, 4 Feb. 2009. Web. 13 Nov. 2009.

Podnieks, Elizabeth. Hit Sluts and Page Pimps: Online Diaristsand Their Quest or Cyber-Union. Lie Writing 1.2 (2004):2148. Print.

---. Web Diaries, Cyber Selves, and Global Intimacy: Surfng Secra

Terris *Footnotes*. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 17.1 (2002):11938. Print.

Publications: Books and Catalogs, 20002004. National PortraitGallery. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, n.d. Web. 13 Nov.2009.

Rollyson, Carl. Biography: An Annotated Bibliography. N.c.: Back-inprint.com, 2007. Print.

---. Biography: A Users Guide. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008. Print.

Schaer, Cathrin. A Lie Less Ordinary. Vogue (Australia) May 2007:198200. Print.

Seraty, Viviane. The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview o AmericanOnline Diaries and Blogs. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print.

Solove, Daniel J. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in theInormation Age. New York: New York UP, 2004. Print.

Staley, David. Computers, Visualization and History: How NewTechnology Will Transorm Our Understanding o the Past. New

York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Print.Thompson, Bill. Finding Mysel Through Online Identities. BBCNews. BBC, 14 May 2007. Web. 26 Jun. 2008. .

University o Caliornia, Berkeley, and Partners. Bringing Lives toLight: Biography in Context: Excerpts rom Proposal Narrative.Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. ECAI, 2006. Web. 26 Jun.2008.

Walter, Chip. A Little Privacy Please. Scientic American Jul. 2007:7475. Print.

Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. The Rumpled Bed o Autobio-graphy: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions. Biography24.1(2001): 114. Print.

Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti. Sel-Regarding Art. Biography31.1 (2008): vxxiii. Print.

8/7/2019 24.1.arthur

20/20


Yager, Tom. Should You Trust Your Phone? Tom Yager: Ahead othe Curve. Inoworld, Inc., 12 Apr. 2007. Web. 26 Jun. 2008..

Yeats, W. B. Circus Animals Desertion. The Collected Poems o W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1969: 392. Print.

Zuern, John. Introduction. Online Lives. Spec. issue oBiography26.1 (2003): v-xxv. Print.

24.1.arthur

Documents

Transcript of 24.1.arthur