Monthly Archives: November 2013

Seeing as we are approaching the end of the Winter term, I thought that it fitting to do a final post that delves into one of the most valuable insights I gained from the ASTU 100A course. As I am sure other students will agree, an idea that has been of outmost significance in understanding our work with life narratives has been Whitlock’s notion life narratives as “soft weapons”; that is, influential yet highly malleable tools that have the potential to be manipulated to serve the purposes of dominant entities (for, prior to the course, I had never considered their potential to become such potent forces in shaping discourse and social action.) We have touched upon “their political agency” at various instances during the course, emerging yet again in discussion about Chute’s article on Persepolis and the idea that life narratives can act as “lightning rods”. to human rights discourse and engender “social action” in blogs as they can create universal identifications. In doing so, they can consequently draw an empathic and emotional response from readerships. Despite spatial and temporal distance from these autobiographical subjects, we are able to feel certain closeness due to the universality of their experiences, particularly as they are often drawn from the lens of a young child, one whose simplicity of early experiences transcends cultural barriers. Indeed, such a case is apparent in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: where Satrapi’s young perspective is embodied by a child version of herself, from whose naïve eyes we observe an oppressive and violent regime. However, following one of my last blog posts, where I included the article: “Isabel Allende, Loung Ung and the Power of Memoirs”, I’d like to delve further into this last memoir’s power: why is it that Loung Ung’s narrative First They Killed My Father has sparked such a profound emotional response from Western readerships? Are narratives really as invincible and powerful as they often seem to be?

First they Killed My father is a memoir written by Loung Ung, where she recounts her experiences in the Pol Pot regime as a survivor of the Khmer Rouge years. Hers is a traumatic tale of estrangement, separation, and tiredness, hunger, as she is flung into the Cambodian work camps and sees her family members murdered. According to Ung, the core reason for the success of memoirs in general is that they “connect the humanity in us”. According to Ung:“we often hear about many hundred thousands killed in Darfur, and two million in Cambodia. All these big numbers.  Memoirs bring it down to a family, a face… it breaks down that barrier of what is Cambodia, Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Darfur—down to a father, a mother, a brother, a sister.” So, much like other autobiographical voices in her field, in her earnest depiction of easily relatable subjects, Loung reduces those insurmountable chilling statistics of people captured and murdered into that person in the street, that guy in the supermarket, our cousin, our brothers. In short, these people are brought to life through the words, made flesh by the recounting of their experiences. 

However, as commodities transferred on a global scale through circuitous movements, life narratives are subject to influence by the unpredictable forces of the marketplace and by consequence we can never truly discern audience reactions to the literary work. As Schaffer and Smith suggest, while in one location a life narrative can be the starting incentive of a human rights campaign, in another it may be the subject to substantial backlash and negative feedback. In which locations we will see these, and whether these two polar opposite reactions will be manifested, we cannot predict. Schaffer and Smith’s idea is exemplified by Loung’s memoir: on the one hand, the narrative has gained rapid success among book critic groups, launching Loung to a celebrity status as the current national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. Furthermore, it has sparked an outpouring of invitations from universities seeking to have her as a guest speaker for students about the genocide in Cambodia. On the other hand, reception from Cambodian American communities has been far from favorable: in fact, much like I, Rigoberta Menchu’s life narrative in, Loung’s autobiography has generated controversy with regards to the literary “authenticity” of her work.  These communities claim that her narrative is  “exaggerated, biased by her own prejudices, and peppered with untruths in an effort to profit from the atrocities of that time”, a comment that has drawn the author’s attention to the point that she herself has written an informal apology for the hurt caused by her book and provided further explanation and justification for the book. Ultimately, this shows that there are all sorts of forces working for and against life narratives:  while we must recognize their substantial agency, it is also important to note that they fall vulnerable to market forces and constantly shifting sociopolitical ideologies. Most of the time, it is often impossible to predict where these forces will take them.

After reading my fellow classmates’ blog posts on how different apps and websites could be considered to be life narratives (particularly Margot’s blog post on the new app Bitstrips and Makoto’s blog post on Youtube) I began to become interested in how other websites could potentially be seen as autobiographical narratives. So I decided to investigate whether Flickr, an image and video hosting website, could be considered to be a life narrative. Although not as a popular as in its early days, Flickr still remains the preferred photo storage and sharing sites out there for professional photographers; for the rest of us, Instagram and Tumblr seem to have become the norm. Having recently accessed Flickr, I noticed that several changes have occurred: not only does it now allow for visitors to access the website from their Facebook and Google+ accounts (in addition to the original Yahoo! account) but its layout has undergone a complete transformation. The Flickr layout that I remember was simple, minimalistic and had a sheer white background. The new design, however, echoes the mosaic-like home page of Pinterest, with a pitch-black background and an infinite-scrolling feature. Much like the photos Tumblr, each photograph here has a feature at its bottom-left allowing visitors to like, comment or share the photographs on various virtual platforms (namely, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Tumblr).

Browsing through the website, it seems that Flickr has taken more than one cue from its highly popular contemporaries. Whereas before the user’s personalized page focused solely on the photographs that the user had uploaded, it now boasts a number of new sub sections. To start off, there is the photostream section, which assembles photographs from the user and arranges them in reverse chronological order, as well as the “sets”, “favorites and “creations” sections, that remind me of Youtube’s personalized page. Given the multitude of features provided, the user has the freedom to control and directly modify the content in their page, thus they are able to mold their page to reflect specific dimensions of their personality- or rather, to showcase a self that they yearn to be. Here, the user speaks merely by virtue of the visual; the textual is most often minimal and is not read, although it provides context that is often necessary to understand the relevance and importance of a photograph. While often photographs are uploaded with no specific intention, but rather simply because they are perceived to be aesthetically pleasing after undergoing digital manipulation, (example) some users include photographs in an attempt to track momentous parts of their journey- a moment of relaxation in their life, the celebration of a birthday.

Likewise, often a series of photographs can be gathered and used to give life to marginalized subjects and minority groups, and thus create a collective life narrative. For instance the user Huzzatul Mursalin’s photostream provides insight into the daily lives of people in Dhaka, Bangladesh capturing them as they perform their daily tasks, dance in their streets, interact in the food markets. Altogether these photographs provide glimpses into fragments of their life, reflecting the daily existence of these workers and their family: while some scenes are colored with happiness and beauty, others capture them in moments of motion as they immerse themselves within their tasks. As the user binds these photographs together, he constructs his own version on the collective life narrative of the Bangladeshi people. Nevertheless, the collection of photographs is certainly limited by the fact that a selection of photographs have been actively chosen and thus they are not representative of all the lives of the Bangladeshi people.

What do you think? Do you believe that it is possible to see the website Flickr as an autobiographical practice? If so, does its architecture facilitate the presentation of personal life narratives or collective life narratives? Let me know in the comments below!

Throughout our study on life narratives, one aspect that has really caught my attention is the use of life narratives as form of therapy or emotional release. We have certainly discussed the idea of life narrative as therapy in class, particularly following our presentation on the website PostSecret, as questions emerged about the likely possibility of users sending their confessional secrets in mail to the website as a way to free themselves from the weight of bearing private secrets. However, I feel that this is an area that requires further exploration: for this, I’d like to turn to the personal memoir Paula, written by the renowned Chilean novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende. For those of you unfamiliar with Allende and her work, basically, she is widely known in Latin America and abroad for her novel The House of Spirits (or “La Casa de los Espiritus”) certainly one of the most memorable books I have ever read. (There’s even a movie with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons and Antonio Banderas). As far as her style, I think its significant to mention that Allende tends to continually blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, as she incorporates fragments of her own life into richly imaginative and meandering narratives.

As a memoir, Paula consists of a compilation of letters written by Allende as her daughter falls ill and succumbs to a “poryphia-induced coma”, as well as Allende’s own autobiographical account of her most obscure past experiences. In the article Mourning becomes Paula: The Writing Process as Therapy, writer Linda S. Maier argues that for Allende, the memoir Paula partially “serves as a creative, therapeutic release to help the author cope with personal tragedy” (Maier 237). This is certainly apparent in her interview with Marianne Schnall (7/11/08) for the article Isabel Allende, Loung Ung and the Power of Memoir, where Allende revealed that the main reason why she started the letters for Paula was that she recognized “the only way [for her] to deal with [her] grief was through writing”. Features of this “therapeutic release” are certainly evident in her inability to contain her focus as she reminisces her family life in the first chapter, fluctuating continually back and forth in time as she recounts her journey in a way that seems to exhibit characteristics of a person in the process of mourning. Following some research, I found out that the letters that eventually became part of the book were, in fact, written at the hospital as Allende witnessed her daughter’s progressive fall into her disease and subsequent comma.

To an extent, therefore, we could infer that Allende turned to storytelling as a way to heal and to come to terms with the overwhelming sense of loss and grief. Much like the protagonist of Dave Egger’s novel What is the What, Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, (who would tell his silent stories to anyone, willing to listen or not) Allende traces back her traumatic life story partially as a means to maintain her spirit, to find “strength” (Eggers 535) in her otherwise grueling and traumatic reality. Yet it is important to recognize that various motives could have played a role in her decision to produce her letters and to compile them into a memoir, and it would be an insult to the author to judge her only motive for writing the book as her need to cope with her debilitating sense of loss. Rather, one could also contend that Allende perhaps turned to storytelling to find the  “sense of clarification” and “social control” (Miller and Shepherd 12) outlined by Miller and Shepherd; that is, to both find a viable way to reflect and understand her experiences in isolation and to transform her experiences into her own “prisoners”, or moments that she has control over; not vice-versa.

What do you think?

For further information about Allende, here’s a link to her TED talk “Tales of Passion“:

Works Cited

Eggers, Dave. What is the What. New York: Vintage Books, 200. Print.

Maier, L. A. “Mourning Becomes Paula: The Writing Process as Therapy for Isabel Allende” (2003). Hispania, 86(2), 237-243. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.

A couple of weeks ago, me and a group of ASTU classmates gave a presentation about the construction of personal identity in PostSecret, a website that defines itself as an “on-going community art project”. Following our presentation, the Six-Word Memoir group, in focusing on the website Six Word Memoir, touched upon a subject that had been of great interest to me and my other classmates as we sought to decide the big issue in our presentation: community. Throughout their presentation, we were able to see how the features of the website allowed people to feel part of a larger, all-encompassing community. After the class, I was left wondering: how is it that social platforms, like PostSecret, Six-Word Memoir and Facebook generate a strongly interlinked and bonded community, or, more accurately, “engender a psychological sense of community” (Reich 1)? Do individuals truly derive a warm feeling of belonging and understanding in these seemingly distant, impersonal digital sites?

To explore how Post secret and Six-Word Memoir allow visitors to develop a sense of community, I think that it important to first provide a sound, workable definition for the abstract term “community”. I will be using the definition coined by Sociology and Urban Studies professor Barbara Phillips, whose book my Urban Studies Professor Dr. Elvin Wyly commonly draws from when contextualizing the content of our lectures. Philips sees community as “a group sharing an identity and a culture, typified by a high degree of social cohesion” (Phillips, 2010, p.167). The first part seems at odds with the cyber communities in PostSecret, Facebook and Six-Word Memoir, given that, for the most part, we can safely say that members of these communities generally do not possess exact identities or cultures . Yet, they do seem to exhibit that high degree of social cohesion captured by this definition, for members often do seem to have the sense of emotional connection and integration that I believe are characteristic of communities. In their article, Miller and Shepherd recognized that one of the key “exigences” (Miller and Shepherd 12) , that is, the main rhetorical motives for bloggers (and perhaps visitors of websites like PostSecret and Six-Word Memoir), is the need for “cultivation and validation of the self”(Miller and Shepherd 12). Recognizing this fundamental human need, many website developers including those in PostSecret, Six-Word Memoir and Facebook have provided tools to ensure that, regardless of their background or struggles, people feel included within these communities.

With regards to Facebook, I would argue that perhaps the most visible tools that enable people to feel part of a community are the Facebook Groups and Community groups, seen on the left-hand column in the Home Feed. Looking at my own news feed, you can see the Nootka group,  The Fables, (my Jumpstart Learning community) and a family group titled “Gonzalez Family”. In joining these groups, Facebook allows its members to feel connected to, and integrated within, a wider group with similar interests, therefore building a sense of belonging.

Unlike Facebook, however, PostSecret has a separate branch titled PostSecret community, with a small subsection named “PostSecret Chat” where we find several categorized self-help and personal identity groups. As you can see below, the website has distinctive categories such as PostSecret Discussion, PostSecret Internative Community, in which an array of different interests and concerns are catered for by having sections such as Secrets of Mental Health, Spirituality, Soldiers’, LGBTQ, targeted at different individuals. By encouraging visitors to join in and engage with others in a conversation about specific issues, these group forums foster communication, interdependence and thus allow members to build an emotional connection with others in a technological platform. Not only are users able to interact with each other, but in the cases of mental health, they can also seek out information and provide support for other members, often even directly offering to help others in their recovery process. For instance, as I was browsing through one of the mental illness group threads, I noticed that one of the respondents tried to provide support to another participant simultaneously by giving advice and by ensuring them that, if they ever need to talk, they can always “PM” them.

Some  argue that the unprecedented success of websites such as Facebook has directly influenced other websites, for in constructing their virtual communities they have “sought to incorporate [Facebook’s architectural features] into many of [their] digital platforms”. Indeed, Six-Word Memoir is a prime example of this appropriation, for (as enlightened by the Six-Word Memoir group presentation) it allows readers to comment on the memoirs and even “like” them. In addition, members are able to share the memoirs they come across with friends in other social-networking sites by virtue of a Share button, thereby enabling individuals to feel immersed within a community and helping to strengthen their social relationships through sustained interaction.

Overall, while Six-Word Memoir, Facebook and PostSecret use starkly different features to create virtual communities, they all fulfill need to belong by allowing membership to “exclusive” groups and inviting people to contribute and express their thoughts within specified parameters. Have you recognized any other distinguishing features in these sites or perhaps other sites that help to build this enigmatic sense of “community”? Is this always a positive community, in the sense that it brings benefits to users, or have you come across sites where this is not the case (e.g. Youtube and Pinterest)?

Reich, S. (2010) Adolescent’s sense of community on Myspace and Facebook: A Mixed-Methods approach. Journal of Community Psychology. Vol. 38, No. 6, 688–705. University of California, Irvine. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

Miller, C. Shepherd, D. Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog. North Carolina State University

Over the past few weeks, the work we have done in class about life narratives has sparked my interest on the differing pathways that can be used in the construction of human identities. During our PostSecret group presentation, I had the opportunity to delve into the creation of personal identities through visual and the verbal elements in PostSecret postcards. However, looking back, I realize that our presentation suffered a key limitation: in our sole focus on PostSecret, we only touched upon a specific form of self-disclosure- that is, self-disclosure in an anonymous virtual world. We neglected to consider “nonymous” social networking sites such as Facebook, which have come to redefine both our social interactions and our personal identities. In particular, the highly popular website Facebook, (which I assume requires no introduction) provides a virtual platform through which we can shape and re-shape our identities.

Before I move on to my main argument, I’d like to first provide a sociological framework for my ideas, specifically the sociological perspective that we discussed just this past week in our CAP Sociology lectures: Sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of dramaturgy. In essence, Goffman argues that our actions as individuals are a series of theatrical performances. Therefore, much like actors in a play, we adjust and enhance facets of ourselves in different scenarios, assuming masks to project“ideal” images for specific audiences. We see this theatricality explicitly manifested in various forms in our society. To take an example, when political figures such as Barrack Obama deliver public speeches, they laboriously control their vocal gestures and body language to convey qualities that are socially expected of leaders of their stature- the most prominent of which are conviction, courage, strength, and integrity. Once they descend the stage and are away from the public eye in the “back stage” they undergo a transformation. But this is not restricted to political figures. We also change masks constantly in our everyday lives. For instance, the version of ourselves that we show our parents distinctly differs from the version that emerges in the company of our friends.

Taking this into consideration, it could be said that Facebook is its own theatrical stage, where people put forth a “front stage” performance. Through a combination of symbols, photographs and text, individuals present, shape and alter their identities. The template of the personal profile itself allows users to divulge a significant amount of personal information, including personal preferences. These serve to classify them into specific subcultures, acting as vehicles to the projection of a highly-specified “self”. Yet self-representation is not limited to the “About me” box, far from it in fact. Each picture and status, however insignificant it may appear, can actually be considered an identity marker.  A relatively new addition to Facebook that I find fascinating in terms of identity construction is the Timeline Review, a tool that allows us to check photos or posts that we are tagged in before they appear on the public timeline. As you can see below, the tool offers the option to accept or deny the post before it is posted on the timeline. Further, it enables the user to decide which specific Facebook friends will have access to the content. Features such as this are allowing us to attain even more control over who gets to see what dimensions of our personality. As Facebook users, we specifically select the dimensions that we want to highlight. Those that we want to conceal are literally “hidden” from our timeline, helping us to construct segmented online identities.

Returning back to the idea of Facebook as a metaphorical theatrical stage, does this then mean are we all wearing masks?

Perhaps not.  Then again, I do believe that, given the multiple tools that we have to construct our identities, we should be more critical consumers of Facebook profiles.

What do you think?

Can the selves we show in social networking sites ever be considered “authentic”?