Max Saunders

My name is Max Saunders. I’m professor of English at King’s College London, and also Co-director of the Centre for Life Writing Research.

The original idea for the Ego Media Project came out of work we were doing at the Centre for Life Writing Research here at King’s, and particularly some of the really cutting-edge research that colleagues and and some of our Visiting Fellows to the Centre were doing on life writing in digital media.

One of the main research questions of the Ego Media project was to look at how the new media – social media in particular – had impacted on how people present themselves when they’re online.

We also wanted to look at how these new practices of self-presentation changed how one wanted to theorize what was happening. But also to think about what life writing theory could tell us about what was happening in the new media.

Now, life writing as a field traditionally has concentrated on forms of writing, people writing about themselves or others like biography or autobiography, people writing letters, keeping diaries. And now people were beginning to turn to work in very different media.

The question was, you know, did we need a new set of theories to deal with this? Or what could the new material tell us about life writing theory, what could life writing theory tell us in helping us to understand these new materials?

When we were setting up the project, I’d imagined that it would be much more of a single thing. That people, as it were, would be working on the same project from different angles.

What happened as we began work, was that it became clearer that it made more sense as a suite of subprojects.

That was always part of the design, but those projects had an integrity, and needed to, you know, to remain separate to a greater degree than I’d perhaps anticipated.

Over the course of the project we had regular methodology workshops and meetings at least every month right through the 5-year extent of the project. And so we’ve been talking all the time about what our points of consensus and agreement, and disagreement or divergence, are.

One of the really interesting things about the project has been the way, towards the end of it, that we’ve then stood back from those projects and asked what they have in common, and tried to sort of make clear what the coherence is. And we’ve tried to articulate this in the the series of theme essays which have really addressed these questions and try to chart the way our thinking has developed over the course of it all.

We wanted to work with Mass Observation, because we thought the kind of detail that the respondents give would be one of our best ways of getting at that question of the sort of self-reflexiveness about social media use.

The Mass Observation Archive came out of a very radical bit of social research that started in the 1930s. They got a lot of volunteers to record, you know, their observations of daily life in response to specific questions.

The archive ended up in the University of Sussex, and they then starting it up again. So, we were able to do some work with them by sending out what they call a directive.

We had a directive which included a couple of tasks that we asked people to do. So one of them was just to list, you know, the first five things that came into their heads when, you know, they were asked about social media and online communities.

The other task was to look themselves up on Google, and see what they found, and describe what was there and what their reaction to that was.

And then, in between, there was a questionnaire which asked quite a lot of questions about their social media practice, and sort of views of different platforms and different websites.

The respondents do tend to write in quite a personal way. They think of it more like a diary than something they would tell to a journalist. And we got some wonderfully fine-grained responses, very detailed, very thoughtful, sometimes very funny. It was incredibly helpful for us.

The To-Day and To-Morrow series was a really fascinating experiment, really. It was a series of very short books – more like pamphlets – there were about 110 of them in the end, where different experts – writers, sort of public figures – were brought in to choose the subject and to say where it was then, that was the To-Day part, and then to predict the future.

And it produces a really wonderful genre which isn’t quite like anything else, where people are writing, you know, what nowadays we call nonfiction – except, of course, that it is all made up.

The books are often both very entertaining and very visionary about the future. Some of them, of course, get things massively wrong when they’re predicting. But some of them are surprisingly, you know, farsighted and and ingenious.

The book series ran from 1923 to 1931, so, you know, about twelve, thirteen years before the first computer was up and running. And they don’t quite foresee the computer, which is odd, really, given how close it was.

But, even more strangely given that they didn’t foresee the computer, they did foresee a lot of the things that we have that you need computers to run, like smartphones or the internet. And so I was thinking about futurology and in its relation to these kinds of technology.

The series is now almost 100 years old, and I thought it would be really interesting to see what happened if you tried to run the experiment again, and got some, you know, experts in digital technologies and in digital media to talk about what they thought the future of those was. And so we had a lecture series called “Life Online Today and Tomorrow,” where we got a lot of people from very different subjects and with different experience to talk about the way they thought things were heading and what the developments would be.