“Getting a Digital Life: Self-Presentation Online”

February 26, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Kuykendall 410

Digital environments situate subjects as assemblages of surfaces, networks, archives, nodes, and avatars, blurring the boundaries of individual lives and at times “remixing” aspects of multiple persons. Key concepts in the contents, coordinates, and categories of self-presentation--such as archives, memory, identity, authenticity, branding, and quantification—indicate that what formerly was called the individual “self” is now a distributed subjectivity across shifting relationships and ideological investments. What issues do these virtual “I”’s raise?

Julia Watson is professor emerita of comparative studies at The Ohio State University. She and Sidonie Smith have co-written Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (second, expanded edition, 2010), co-edited five collections on life narrative, and published several essays, most recently on the metrics of authenticity in testimony and on online life narrative. Watson has also recently published essays in the areas of graphic memoir, visual diaries, and voice in memoir.


Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
808-956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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