Last week I began an exploration of how the virtual world affects the way we tell our stories and construct our identities. I began with a reflection on social media’s response to Trey Pennington’s death a week ago today. So exactly what perspective was I trying to convey in Part 1? Perhaps … We often withhold important parts of our storied identities in the virtual world. Lyndsay Grant writes:

… there is [a] less empowering side to narrative capital: the imperative to cultivate the ‘right’ sort of life story. The kind of story that grants access to networks of power and influence, the kind that presents the constantly upbeat version of ourselves that everyone wants to be friends with or the professional version that is sought after as an employee or expert.

I’m sure Trey withheld his depression, pain, and suicidal thoughts in the real world, as well, yet posthumous writings by those who knew him best suggest that these parts of his story and his identity were more apparent in the flesh-and-blood world.

Some additional perspectives on storied identity construction in the virtual world:

We scatter fragments of our stories through social media, but curation is usually required to connect the dots, filter out the noise, and really tell the story. Such was the case in another posthumous situation. In A Facebook story: A mother’s joy and a family’s sorrow, the Washington Post, with a family’s permission, edited and annotated the Facebook wall of a new mother to tell a tragic story. Reading the wall in raw form, I’m sure, would not tell the story the way the Post’s curation did.

Stories in social media have no beginnings or endings — or do they? In Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings? in New York magazine, Paul Ford contends that social media is not a narrative form: “Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings.” In contrast, in old media, Ford asserts, stories begin and end. Articles end. TV news segments end. “No matter what comes along streams, feeds, and walls,” he writes, “we will still have need of an ending.” The two preceding perspectives suggest that death ends stories in social media. The eerie postings on the Facebook walls of the deceased, however, indicate that while we may cease to be the authors of our own stories when we die, those we leave behind add new threads and layers to our storied online identities when we’re gone.

The “autobiographical impulse manifests itself in cyberspace” where the number and variety of ways for this impulse to manifest itself have never been greater. The quoted portion of the foregoing comes from Elayne Zalis, who remarked a couple of weeks ago on Facebook that it was time to revisit a paper she wrote back in 2003, “At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes,” in Biography, Volume 26, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 84-119, University of Hawai’i Press Noting that “the autobiographical impulse manifests itself in cyberspace” and “professional and nonprofessional communicators alike construct personal home pages, online diaries, blogs, and generic hybrids that fuse elements of traditional and new media, Elayne introduces her essay:

… this essay considers how a selection of generic hybrids opens up new arenas for staging autobiographical scenes differently. Produced by writers, Net artists, and media makers, Family Portrait, Grandfather Gets a House, The Family Album Project, Home Maker, and Heard It in the Playground are united by a common tendency to raise questions about the meaning, recollection, and locus of “home” in a digital age. Tapping into diverse repertoires, these Web sites transform personal home pages into “new spaces for cultural intervention” that merge “private” and “public” spheres …. Experiments with collaborative storytelling, hypermedia, and interactivity enrich the autobiographical performances, and engage visitors who stop by en route from one site to another. Based on my own excursions in cyberspace, I will conduct a guided tour of these virtual domains.

I asked her if these virtual domains still exist eight years later. Perhaps surprisingly, four out of the five do:

• Family Portrait
• Home Maker
• Heard It in the Playground (original site unavailable)
• Grandfather Gets a House
• The Family Album Project

Add to those myriad more that have emerged in the years since, some of which you can see on my inside page, Links about Journaling, Memoir-Writing, and Personal Storytelling.