Online Autobiography--Web 1.0: Same Old Genre Issues

In Writing Your Life Story, But Not Necessarily Your Autobiography (2002) Elizabeth Bezant noted, “[F]ew autobiographies are printed by traditional publishing houses. And often the ones they do accept are picked because the story is exceptional or the writer is well known” (Bezant). Digital versions of autobiography on the Internet, of course, are not bound to the editorial discretion of established publishing houses. Nor are online “personal homepages”[i] constrained by the costs associated with print or the problems of distribution. A writer needs only a computer, a word-processing program, and a live Internet connection to post her digital autobiography. But as Bezant’s title implies (i.e., writing a life story as opposed to an autobiography), digital media presents new challenges for the potential autobiographer. For instance, if answering the question, “What is autobiography?”[ii] remains problematic for scholars of print autobiography, the intertextual nature of hypertext complicates the matter further. Hypertext introduces many dynamic qualities not found in print including intertextuality. In defining intertextuality,[iii] I rely upon Jonathan Culler’s definition in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (1981):

Literary works are to be considered not as autonomous entities, ‘organic wholes,’ but as intertextual (emphasis mine) constructs: sequences which have meaning in relation to other texts which they take up, cite, parody, refute, or generally transform. A text can be read only in relation to other texts….the autonomy of texts is a misleading notion….” (38, 103).

One such early online autobiography that exemplifies the inclusion of intertextual hypertext elements is Justin Allyn Hall’s “Justin's Links from the Underground—autobio.” A pioneer of web logging (blogging) and perhaps even its “founding father” according to Jeffrey Rosen of The New York Times (2004), Hall describes himself as “writ[ing] and speak[ing] on years of personal experience with digital culture and electronic entertainment” and “search[ing] for intimacy and stimulation in technology” (Hall). Now a 38 year-old living in San Francisco, California, Hall began writing his personal web “homepage” online in January 1994 as a Swarthmore College student at the age of 19 when the general public had little access to the Internet and little knowledge of the potential of hypertext. Already aware of the dialogical essence of constructing a self online, he declares, “All of information space is a shared multiplayer adventure” (Hall). While Hall claims to have retired from writing his autobiography in 2005, he still maintains a prodigious online presence (as of July 2009) with no less than three social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster), a professional networking site (Linkedin), three weblogs (Justinhall, MyBlogLog, just in teractive) an image sharing account (flickr), a company website (GameLayers.com), a Twitter account, and numerous additional active websites. Though he has recently shifted his creative energies away from his autobiography to a process he calls passively multiplayer online gaming (PMOG),[iv] Hall’s original website “Justin's Links from the Underground—autobio” serves as an archetypal example of the ways in which early (pre Web 2.0) authors of online autobiography incorporate hypertext elements in their writing.

In a hyperlinked webpage under the subheader, “why [sic] the web?” Hall asks a question so familiar to the history of the autobiographical impulse that could have been uttered by St. Augustine himself—“Why put details about your personal life online?” His answer reveals both an early if perhaps utopian understanding of the Internet’s potential:

"What would you rather read? A pamphlet? Or a heartfelt tale, or personal perspective? The web will reflect humanity if we put our lives online. Putting our lives online does not mean leading our lives online, it is about utilizing unprecedented sharing. We interact in the real world, and we use cyberspace to collaborate and share and conjure new possibilities. Do we want to see ourselves, joys and sorrows, reflected in cyberspace, or do we want an easier mall? Not that both won't exist, but when you sit down to craft your page, take into account which you'd rather see…. Would
you rather they read your resume, or your autobiography (emphasis mine)?" (Hall)

Using Hall’s autobiographical homepage as a prototypical example, an appropriate answer to his last rhetorical question might be yet another question: Could you tell the difference between the resume and autobiography, i.e., could the two genres be easily separated? In “Justin’s Links…,” Hall’s incorporation of so-called “work-related” genres, i.e., resumes, cover letters, letters of recommendation, course syllabi, audio files and written transcripts of professional speeches, et al., certainly blurs the boundaries between these autobiographical “fragments” and the autobiographical narrative.

[i] The phrase “personal homepages” is used interchangeably in popular culture with the terms homesite, homepage, personal webpage, and personal website when referring to online autobiography, hypertext autobiography, and digital autobiography. While having multiple terms may present problems of referentiality, these terms refer to the autobiographical texts in online environments.

[ii] Certainly, this question is still problematic, but as Susanna Egan notes in Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (1999), it is a topic that has largely “been theorized out of existence” along with the idea of the ontological self (9).

[iii] In addition to Culler, for more information on the concept of intertextuality see also Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980) and Gunhild Agger’s Intertextuality Revisited: Dialogues and Negotiations in Media Studies (1999). For a critique of intertextuality, see William Irwin’s “Against Intertextuality” (2004).

[iv] According to Justin Allyn Hall, Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming or PMOG “is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.”