Personal Stories, Corporate Templates

Jill Walker Rettberg,University of Bergen
Personal Stories,
Corporate Templates
The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art PracticeBergen, November 8-10, 2009
Image: “iheartlatkes”, (CC) http://www.flickr.com/photos/41520827@N05/3901774629/

Literary narrative genres develop from personal narrative practices
Photo: (CC) Lenore Edmanhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/lenore-m/467996341/

Writing girls
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
Image: http://flickr.com/photos/hand-nor-glove/179558293/ by “This Year’s Love”

Personal media are the opposite of mass media.
Lüders, Marika (2008) ‘Conceptualizing Personal Media’. New Media and Society 10 (6): 683-702.

Photo: Jeff Hitchcock (“Arbron”) (CC) http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbron/65785552/

Photo from Flickr, CC by Dean Michaud (DNAMichaud)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnamichaud/3237424855/

Today’s narrative practices are changing rapidly.
Norway: every month 60% use Facebook; nearly 10% use Twitter (http://www.slideshare.net/PetterB/foredrag-om-delingskulturen)

Miles Hochstein: A Documented Life http://www.documentedlife.com

Eleanor Antin: Carving, 1972.

Noah Kalina, 2006:

http://www.everyday.noahkalina.com/

People love it – and make their own versions

Dailybooth.com

Tehching Hsieh, 1980-1981
(
)
Thanks to Mark Jeffery for telling me about this.

Simple rules seem to encourage everyday creativity.

We follow cultural templates both in living and documenting our lives.
(CC) Carlos Mendozahttp://www.flickr.com/photos/fotodisenocm/385028368/

Preformatted baby journals are examples of normative discursive strategies that either implicitly or explicitly structure our agencies.
Van Dijck, José (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.

http://corriehaffly.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/do-it-yourself-pregnancy-and-baby-journal/

What happens when these narrative patterns aren’t hand-crafted but are automatically generated?
Image: (CC) Terrenin Virginiahttp://www.flickr.com/photos/8136496@N05/2196367188/

trixietracker.com

This is the opposite of the preformatted baby journal: our daily (unconscious?) patterns are visualised

Four ways social media organises representations of our lives:

Facebook Friend Visualiser (TouchGraph)

Trixietracker.com
Google search history
Flickr.com Archive View

The World as a Blog
Nike’s “Just Map It”
“Countries I’ve visited”

Mass cultural production follows templates set up by the professional entertainment industry. Are we even more firmly colonized by commercial media today than in the 20th century?
Manovich, Lev (2009) ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production.’ Critical Inquiry 35 (2):319-31.
Image:http://www.bijt.org/wordpress/2005/11/

We’re always trapped in (and inspired by) genres, stereotypes, rituals, patterns.

What would literary narratives following these personal but computationally assisted practices look like?

A story told “in Facebook”?

http://www.prototype-experience.com/
Or like those marketing campaigns that uses your data through Facebook Connect?

Or something better.What do you think?

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Personal Stories, Corporate Templates

by Jill Walker Rettberg on Nov 08, 2009

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