Many times during my childhood, I would dream of becoming famous, getting interviewed, asked about my life, and have a legendary biography written about me. But I quickly gave up that dream when I realized that I have to be famous or do something phenomenal to be spotlighted amongst the 7 billion others on this planet. However times have changed. In our modern world, we don’t need to be famous to have a biography or to share our perspectives. Instead, we are constantly updating our biography on the virtual archive of the Internet.

Before the age of social media, there were only few modes of expressing oneself. Word of mouth was a dominant method for a while, along with writing letters and diaries, and keeping photo albums. These all can be alternatives for biographies, however often these life stories only reach people who are related to the autobiographical subject. Even with published autobiographies, it was only possible for the small handful of famous or lucky individuals to share their life stories to a larger audience. However with the emergence of social media and the increasingly equal access to the internet among all classes and races, it allows a chance for ordinary individuals to share their experiences with the global community. It allows individuals to express themselves freely without needing to be particularly famous. In fact, social media creates a space and an opportunity for individuals to be brought to attention. Jamal Edwards makes a greater claim in his TEDx, The Future of Democracy , saying that the “future of prime minister would be discovered on Youtube”. saying people can contribute regardless of their “class, race, or wealth.”

For instance, a major autobiographical site on the Internet is Facebook. As the “Timeline” system suggests, Facebook maps out all the events an individual has gone through since their membership with with the site. People post on pictures, statuses, and links to other sites because they want to ‘share’ their stories. They want other people to know about what they experienced and what their opinions are on certain topics. This in itself is an  biography; they are able to share their life with a mass spectator audience and thus in these ways, our Facebook profile acts as an autobiography.

Although there are countless critics of social media and the dangerous power of the Internet  (e.g. Eli Pariser on his TEDTalk, Beware online “filter bubbles” ) and the issues of loss of privacy due to its savvy system, I personally believe that we should not be critiquing the technologists who planned out this system. Instead the users are ultimately the ones who make the decision and are conscious of what we want to post and send and make it public to share to the rest of the global community. Therefore, I believe that social networking sites are the ideal place for people to want to document their lives, and are place for autobiographies.

In our modern technological society, almost everyone of us have a ‘virtual life’, a life that exists (sometimes exclusively) online. With the multiple social networking platforms which include  Facebook,Twitter, Instagram, and Vines, although some may decide to not engage with social media at all, some people exhaustively document their lives on social media.For those who document every aspect of their lives, and construct a second identity online, I question, why do they do this? What impels people to contribute and to reveal their private lives to such a public global community?

Through my own observations of Facebook, I find the social media platform a way to share their aspects of their private life and use it as a way to show how engaged the individuals are in socialization and exhibit their ‘bettered’ lives. For instance, when looking at my feed, (especially after the weekend) I see countless ‘photo albums’ of people ‘having a great time’ at a party or a night out. Furthermore with my own experiences, after being the designated photographer of an event, I sometimes get people to tell me, “Upload those pictures!!”. What encourages individuals to share these pictures with 300 known others that are my Facebook ‘Friends’, and millions of unknown others that may be in connection with ‘Friends of my Friends’? As a personal response to when I see pictures of others ‘having a great time’, I sometimes feel jealously and excluded. The contrast of being alone at home scrolling through my Newsfeed by myself, creates this conflict within the individual of potentially being ‘anti-social’, which is a very common pressure for adolescents in our current technological society due to social media. Facebook is a tool for individuals to explicitly reveal the elusive relationships they have with the rest of the world and to display their deviation from the ‘anti-social’ stigma and instead reveal themselves rather social.

In addition on Facebook, on Youtube there are vloggers who are Youtube personalities and upload video blogs of themselves, revealing their interests, introducing their family members and friends, and at times rant to the camera about what angers them. There are several ‘daily vloggers’ who broadcast exhaustive information about their daily lives in a 6-8 minute video as well,uploading every single day to a massively global network. But…..who cares and why do people millions of people continue to watch these videos? As demonstrated by Facebook, what other people want to know what others’ are up to, perhaps to compare their lives with others. Especially with daily vlogs on Youtube, people also feel involved and like they are part someone’s life by participating in watching the videos. It also becomes a routine for themselves as well as it becomes a habitual action for them to watch the videos everyday and keeping up to date with the vlogs. (Some examples of daily vloggers: Louis Cole (aka FunforLouis), Grace Helbig (aka DailyGrace), Shay Carl (aka SHAYTARDS)

Thus, essentially, the success of life narratives comes from the audience who are interested in other peoples’ lives. The voyueristic nature in humans, as Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd mention, is the backbone to the success of personal storytelling. These social media sites where people share content of themselves is existent and successful due the audiences who wish to watch them. People are curious of others’ unspoken private lives, and social media allows people to undertake this endeavour.

The other day, my mother introduced me to a page on Facebook called “Humans of New York” (HONY). Scrolling through I found pictures of ordinary people, accompanied with captions beneath. These captions ranged from few words, quotes, dialogues to stories. The captions were cleverly written, most of them very heart warming to the audience. With further research I found out this project was directed by a man named Brandon Stanton. He originally intended to “construct a photographic census of New York City” but along the way the pictures and stories he collected developed into a blog that introduced “strangers of New York” to the global community. This became a phenomenon as he shared these to social media networks, where he established his official website as a “tumblog” on his tumblr page and has gained over 1.7million “likes” on his Facebook page. His success continues with his publication of his photo-book, Humans of New York.

I found these to be interesting research site in the framework of autobiographical studies. The pictures themselves were often average people; people who you would normally walk past a street without a thought, without any acknowledgement of their name or story, what Stanton refers to as “strangers”. They are simply anonymous figures, almost just like visual representations of statistics–they are simply significant for their existence and do not have much value to them. However when Stanton adds a caption/quote describing the unfamiliar face, it becomes a life story, gives character and personality to the visual statistic of a human of New York.

Stanton is clever in the choice of the stories and anecdotes that he attaches to the pictures. He specifically choses what would make the audience, mainly New Yorkers, feel related to this unidentified person mentally and physically. When New Yorkers see the familiar background of their community in the pictures with the people, they feel connected to the person in the sense that they are being introduced to someone who lives within the periphery of the reader’s daily activities and routines. The blurbs accompanied with the picture are often in the theme of conflict of the individual. Thus through HONY, Stanton introduces strangers’ problems, conveying the idea that everyone has problems and all of them are complex and reinforces the maxim that “you are not alone”.

While exploring the tumblr home page, I discovered a tab which posted pictures Stanton expanded his HONY project in the completely contrasting country, “IRAN”. He applied the same techniques he used for the Western residents of New York to the dissimilar Muslim nation as the anecdotes accompanied with the pictures of Persians created an interesting foil against the citizens of New York. Stanton made it seem as the Persians had the same sort of problems as the Western audience, but at the same time made it clear that they had different limitations as represented through the pictures, especially made clear in the images of women, who all wore hijabs.

Stanton’s publication of his book increased the publicity of his works by transferring the virtual world to the real world book stores. However his publication of his book raises the reoccurring ethical uncertainty in the commodification of people’s life narratives. It seems as though he is primarily profiting from the success of his book as it does not mention anywhere where the profits are going towards. Does Stanton have the right to profit off other’s stories and images of random people? Personally, although it does slightly disappoint me that the profits are not going to a charity, I think Stanton should be allowed to profit from the book as he has gotten prior consent (I assume) from the subject to share their picture and stories to others. In addition, perhaps it is anticipated by the subject as well to have Stanton, one with great influence on the virtual community, to share their story to the greater community. Furthermore, it is Stanton’s intelligence and skill, which has enhanced the ordinary pictures and stories of unknown faces of New York, thus it should be recognized as a form of artwork he should be recognized for.

Recently, while exploring jacksgap.com, an Official website operated by Youtube celebrity twins, Jack and Finn Harries, I was recommended the video, Saroo Briely: Homeward Bound. This video was produced by Google Maps, and traced the story of Saroo Briely who was separated from his family but reconnected through Google Maps. This video reminded me of another video that I was suggest by the same twins back in the summer called The Impossible Family Portrait. This video, produced by Skype resembled the video created by Google Maps very much; it illustrated the story of Denis, a Ugandan refugee living apart from his family in America, being reconnected to his family through the use of Skype. Evidently, there is a clear resemblance between the two videos…The use of personal narratives in exhibiting the value of emerging technologies in enhancing the human life.

Throughout the development of civilizations, technologies have always been considered advantageous and beneficial. However in recent years with society’s growing reliance on technology for the functioning of society, advancements in technologies have at times been questioned. A question that arises is the concern with the disconnection with humanity with the increasing dependance on technology. Humans are being replaced by robots in the workforce, large network systems are operated mainly on computer systems, and moreover families are being disconnected due to the disruption of technology such as cellphones and the internet community. Skype and Google Maps are two fairly recent technological programs (both emerged within the past 10 years) have greatly changed the interaction people have with others. Although many people would claim that these are positive development of technology that will contribute to the betterment of society, there may be some people who would be skeptical of these artificial contributors to society.

Thus to prove existence of the connections and enhancement of human relations due to technology, the two applications use life stories of ‘real’ people as promotional material. By using autobiographies, the synthetic applications demonstrate how technology can be integrated into humanity, and thus increasing the sense of association to these programs. They explicitly illustrate the enhancement of the individuals’ lives in contrast to their lives prior to using the application in portraying how advantageous it is in maintaing the relationship with others. Reoccurring in the videos was the theme of “family”, “home”, and “reconnection”. These themes are treasured in Western societies and can be sentimental topics as evident through the comments posted by readers, often along the lines of “Beautiful”, “Inspiring”, and “Brings tears to my eyes”. These comments clearly show that the companies were effective in connecting the virtual programs with human emotion and humanity, successfully integrating technology with humanity. The two programs promote success stories that were made possible due to the collaboration of humans and technology and their co-existence with each other.

With further investigation, I found out that Skype and Google Maps both have entire playlists on Youtube devoted to autobiographies as examples of the use of these technologies in the real world. Their attempt in integrating technology with human activities and establishing their positive presence in the world with these personal narratives is clear as they market their way into humanity.