Reading Mediated Identities: Auto/biographical Agency in the Material Book, Museum Space, Social Media Platforms, and Archives

Abstract

This study considers the invisible or often ignored mediations operating on life narratives to reveal the ever-changing strategies authors, artists, and even corporate social media platforms adopt to shape, control, or resist the auto/biographical in these texts. Adopting Sarah Kember’s and Joanna Zylinska’s focus on the flow of mediation and following their suggestion to “cut” the flow in order to understand our selves within it, I concentrate on mediations operating in several spaces where we find auto/biographical texts: the material book, the museum gallery and its associated online counterparts, social media platforms, and archives. Texts include art works by Karen Hampton and Kara Walker; Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass; April Drexel’s installation Kūpaʻa; Shapira Shahak’s website Yolocaust; and Sydney Iaukea’s The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawaiʻi. In the process, I address a number of questions. As a text moves through different media or spreads through social networks, what agents act upon it? What do the text, the creator, and the audience gain, and what do they lose? How do constantly evolving technologies shape or stymie the auto/biographical “I”? As many of these texts testify to lives in specific times and places, how do the mediations affect larger issues of social and collective memory? Studying these mediations should therefore be a fundamental part of any reading of how we construct our identities and tell the stories of our lives.