Personal Stories, Corporate Templates

Personal Stories,

The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative

Interdisciplinary Art PracticeBergen, November 8-10, 2009

Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen

Image: “iheartlatkes”, (CC) http://www.flickr.com/photos/41520827@N05/3901774629/

Corporate Templates

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) Terren in 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

Flickr.com Archive View

Google search history

“Countries I’ve visited”

Nike’s “Just Map It”

The World as a Blog

Manovich, Lev (2009) ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production.’ Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 319-31.

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?

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”?

Or like those marketing campaigns that uses your data through Facebook Connect?

http://www.prototype-experience.com/

Or something better.What do you think?