[ecrea] Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 9.2

Intellect is excited to announce that /Interactions: Studies in 
Communication & Culture 9.2/ is now available online! For more 
information about the issue, click here >> https://bit.ly/2BTPI0B

This is a special issue entitled 'Autobiography 2.0 and Quick Media Life 
Writing'.

_*Article list*_

*Introduction: Autobiography 2.0 and quick media life writing*

Authors: May Friedman And Silvia Schultermandl
Page Start: 143

This special issue brings together research on the self-in-relation from 
both a narratological angle and from the perspective of gender studies, 
queer theory, postcolonial and transnational studies. The articles 
featured here discuss new and shifting understandings of how we define 
life writing practices differently in an age of online expressions in 
various verbal and visual forms, and through the lens of family, broadly 
defined. In this introduction, we establish the concept of 
‘autobiography 2.0’ as a particular practice of life writing that 
modulates identity and kinship through the use of digital media. This 
introduction addresses key questions we were asking ourselves and the 
individual contributors as we set out to theorize the impact of social 
media and the mediation of family and kinship ties on life writing 
genres: How is relationality mediated differently in an online context 
and how does this impact our ideas about family and kinship? What issues 
of privacy and property are connected to the online presence of digital 
memoirs? Which different reading practices do we need to bring to the 
multi-layered online text of autobiographies 2.0? How does reading 
online autobiographies create kinship ties among readers? How are 
traditional modalities of identity (race, gender, ability, class, etc.) 
destabilized by online life writing?
*
Adoptee life writing 2.0: Transnationality and social justice online*

Authors: Ina C. Seethaler
Page Start: 155

Jane Jeong Trenka was adopted from South Korea in 1972 at the age of 6 
months. Her blog, ‘Jane’s blog: Bitter angry ajumma’, on which she 
published her adoption file, expresses the hope that she ‘will live to 
see the day when adoption as it is practised today is viewed as the 
archaic, primitive and exploitative practice that it really is’. This 
article analyses how Trenka’s web presence challenges rigid identity 
constructions, examines transnational adoption as a consequence of 
globalized oppression and offers an intersectional analysis of 
transnational adoptees’ and poor birth mothers’ lives. Through her blog 
posts, Trenka communicates directly with her audience and engages in 
concrete discussions about transnational adoption and identity. Web 
2.0’s interactive possibilities turn the audience from traditional 
voyeurs into active participants, thereby substituting the patriarchal, 
colonialist gaze that many transnational adoptees experience with a 
powerful virtual collaboration. Trenka’s online life writing takes on a 
decidedly collective nature, challenging master narratives of home and 
identity with counter-histories of oppression and discrimination that 
destabilize social, cultural and political hierarchies. Trenka’s blog 
illuminates connections between the commodification of adoptees, 
cultural forces creating traumatic identity struggles and the choices 
poor women make under structural constraints.

*Insta-judgement: Irony, authenticity and life writing in mothers’ use 
of Instagram*

Authors: May Friedman
Page Start: 169

This article aims to explore the ways that photos and written texts 
using the hashtag #assholeparents extend understandings of both life 
writing theories and the field of motherhood studies. At first glance, 
this hashtag seems to stray from picture-perfect Pinterest parenting. A 
closer analysis, however, reveals that despite the seeming rejection of 
model parenting, the pictures and texts grouped by #assholeparents 
nonetheless affirm deeply normative views of parenting in general and of 
motherhood in particular. As such, while largely featuring children, 
these photographs can arguably stand as maternal self-portraits. This 
examination aims to explore a collection of images as examples of a 
composite form of life writing. The use of life writing as a critical 
practice allows for an analysis of the images and accompanying text that 
aims to pull the camera back and view the context and motivations 
outside the frame. The particular use of Instagram further complicates 
the notion of life writing by presenting each image as an independent 
text but also as part of an emergent composite memoir that borrows from 
and contributes to idealized notions of family.

*Digital life writing: The failure of a diasporic, queer, blue Tinker Bell*

Authors: Ahmet Atay
Page Start: 183

In this article, I sketch various interrelated stories about the ways in 
which I have been using social network sites to reflect my life events, 
share my thoughts and experiences and also story my everyday life to my 
friends and family members who only experience me, my life and my 
realities through mediated and visual narrations. This article will 
theorize life writing in mediated platforms and reflect on different 
aspects of digitalized life writing by using my own stories.

*Writing new branches into being: Connecting donor-linked families via 
Web 2.0*

Authors: Elizabeth Bailey
Page Start: 195

Families that are linked by having chosen the same sperm donor are 
increasingly locating and connecting with each other online. Focusing 
primarily on queer-parented, donor-linked families, this article 
examines the ways in which parents are simultaneously adhering to and 
rebelling against heavy cultural emphasis on genealogical roots as a 
source of self-knowledge and identification. Emerging now via online 
media is a live chronicling of the shifting nature of family and kinship 
which pushes against borders that are commonly believed to be static in 
nature. Quick media allows not only for the volume of personal narrative 
to be increased but the coming together of these voices begins to 
disrupt the hegemony and reshape the narrative itself. This interactive 
shift also impacts the way in which parents develop a parental and 
family identity as online engagement shapes the reader and in turn 
shapes what is written. Within this article, donor-linked families are 
referred to as ‘dibling families’. The colloquial term ‘dibling’ refers 
to a donor sibling, creating a distinction between siblings within an 
individual family unit, while acknowledging a shared genetic connection 
between the children. In choosing to be connected (to varying degrees), 
dibling families are exemplifying hybridized family forms that 
reimagine, rather than completely reify or reject, traditional notions 
of kinship.

*The political leader as online brother*

Authors: Michael Keren
Page Start: 207

‘Lacking for most of Jewish history a national homeland’, wrote Rabbi 
Jill Jacobs, ‘Jews have instead focused on creating holy space within 
their own personal dwellings’. Indeed, the home is the place where much 
of Jewish life takes place, which explains the electoral success in 
recent years of Israel’s ‘Jewish Home’ party, presenting itself as 
guardian of the home and the homeland, both of which are endowed with 
holiness. In this article, I follow the process in which the party 
leader, media-savvy Naftali Bennett, has used his Facebook posts to turn 
his followers into a brotherhood and himself into the beloved brother. I 
argue that the transformation of the leader into an online brother, made 
possible by new digital media, poses a danger to Israeli politics. The 
deliberative democratic process in which people are related but also 
separated enough to maintain their individual persona turns into an 
illusionary brotherly bond that may lead to tyranny of the kind 
associated by Hannah Arendt with the pre-political household.

*Confession narratives and mass kinship of YouTube celebrities: A 
narrative rationality analysis*

Authors: Michael Humphrey
Page Start: 225

Walter R. Fisher argued that human beings are homo narrans or 
storytelling animals who make decisions using narrative rationality, 
which is the ability to choose among competing stories. The question I 
consider is whether Fisher’s arguments have explanatory power in quick 
media, especially a specific type of everyday autobiography: narratives 
of well-known YouTube vloggers confessing intimate details or 
turning-point moments about their lives. Examples of videos include 
coming out as LGBTQ, serious illness, relationship dissolution and 
depression. This textual analysis looks at both sides of YouTube 
discourse – creator vlogs and audience comments.

*Reframing adoptive family narratives through digital and social media 
technologies*

Authors: Julie Samuels
Page Start: 239

This article examines some of the transformations within adoptive family 
dynamics driven by digital and social media technologies. Extending 
beyond the privacy within the adoptive family narrative to direct and 
often-unmediated communication with biological kin, these technologies 
continue to offer choices, opportunities, threats, temptations and new 
challenges. It is within these online communities that conversations 
within the adoption triad (the term used to describe the adopted 
individual, the adoptive family and the biological family) continue to 
reveal and document these transformations. It is partially due to these 
conversations within the adoption triad that we are compelled to 
reconsider what it means to be an adoptive family in the twenty-first 
century. For an adoptive parent, these digital communications within the 
adoption triad continue to reframe both our family narrative and shared 
experiences of adoption.
*
Reading for connectivity: Aesthetics and affect in intermedial 
autobiographies 2.0*

Authors: Silvia Schultermandl
Page Start: 251

Autobiographies 2.0 are affect-saturated texts. Studying them therefore 
demands a shift from content to form and its affective work. In literary 
studies, the affective turn has generated a renewed interest in the ways 
in which emotions can be aesthetically experienced by readers. This 
attention to the interactive relationship between readers, authors and 
text is a staple of reader response theory and has laid the groundwork 
in new media studies to theorize the blending of these designated roles 
(such as Bruns’s concept of produsage). Affect theory can also shed 
light on the dynamic process of establishing kinship and a sense of 
belonging to networked identities on the web. My article offers a 
discussion of the aesthetic strategies through which online intermedial 
life writing affectively interpellates its readers. As a case study, I 
analyse the online curated art project Family Line-Ups, which features 
twenty sets of family portraits (each consisting of three photos of 
family members from different generations) and verbal narratives that 
relate to them.


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