Life Online To-Day and To-Morrow

Where the section devoted to the To-Day and To-Morrow book series looks at the future being imagined in the 1920s and early 1930s, here we consider the future being thought about now; and specifically, how the discourses and imaginaries of contemporary information and media technologies are inexorably bound up with speculation about the future. That is, the new technologies offer what anthropologist Marc Augé calls “the ideology of the future now.”¹ Ego Media explored such speculation through a series of curated talks and discussions called “Life Online To-Day and To-Morrow,” in which writers, academics, and artists consider present and future changes in lives, experiences, and practices resulting from the information revolution.

Ego Media was supported by a larger community of scholars, thinkers, and writers than the contributors who have devised this publication. We were fortunate in being able to assemble a broad International Network of digital life-writing experts, and our conversations with them – in many media, including conversation – ensured that our own research and interests were kept informed and challenged by developments elsewhere in the field and by awareness of wider contexts.

The most visible form their input took was participation in Ego Media’s series of sixteen public lectures and discussions which ran between 2015 and 2017.

The series was called “Life Online Today and Tomorrow,” in homage to the visionary 1920s book series To-Day and To-Morrow that grappled with the explosion of new technologies, norms, and mores a century ago (discussed here for its anticipations of Ego Media). Life Online Today and Tomorrow was designed, like its precursor, and like Ego Media itself, to survey the present state of the field, gauging its trajectories so as to offer glimpses of possible future developments. We also hosted a meeting of our International Network of leading life-writing and new media experts in September 2015, which included three thematic discussions on topics central to the project.

These events proved central to our work. They were formed by, formed, and continued to inform, the team’s thinking, approaches, and ideas throughout the course of the project. As a result, the following reflection on the key events, their timings, and contexts provides both a panoramic view of the Ego Media project landscape and a gateway into its varied and various spaces. The talks themselves are not included, but videos or podcasts of most (plus transcripts) are available on the project website.²

The Life Online Today and Tomorrow series opened on May 26, 2015 with James Harkin, journalist and author of (amongst other books) Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live (Abacus, 2009). His title was “Revolution 2.0? A Critical Review of New Media in the ‘Arab Spring.’” Social media were quickly perceived as a crucial factor in those movements. Paulo Gerbaudo wrote in Tweets and the Streets about how the rise of social media was inextricable from the emergence of such new forms of protest. Commentators were also pointing to the use of new media by combatants in the Syrian civil war. Shiraz Maher, from King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalism told the BBC in April 2014 of the findings of the Centre’s report on how foreign fighters were also using social media to document the conflict and mobilize support.

Harkin had recently returned from Syria, where he was researching his book Hunting Season: The Execution of James Foley, Islamic State, and the Real Story of the Kidnapping Campaign That Started a War (Little, Brown, 2015). He had found that the narrative of empowerment through online social networks had given way to a disturbing counternarrative, as the security forces that had at first been outmaneuvered by mobile activist networking had themselves turned to the new media, not only to enhance their counterinsurgency operations, but to identify and then track down the activists.

After Edward Snowden’s revelations of 2013 the idea that states conducted covert surveillance of its citizens’ internet usage was not news. But Harkin’s lecture laid out a powerful instance of the deep ambivalences that were beginning to characterize discourse about social media. Technologies that granted users agency on the one hand but which sought ways to control their behavior on the other. Technologies that democratized knowledge on the one hand, vastly augmenting our ability to share and find information, but which also perform their work without our knowledge, sharing our data with the state, or selling it to corporations without our informed consent. These ambivalences were not at the center of all Ego Media’s work, but they were to cast a shadow over much of it.

Indeed, they were soon to form the dominant critical analysis of social media, as more information emerged about the use of bots to influence the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum, and then about the illicit trade in personal data to facilitate this influence revealed in the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal of 2018. Similarly, the covert commercial use of personal data received its definitive treatment in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, also in 2018.

The work of Ego Media is informed by this critique, and these ideas recurred in the lectures and discussions. Nevertheless, it sometimes felt as if the center of gravity of the field was shifting ever further from our key research question of how life online, and in particular self-presentation, had been affected by the development of new media.

Such a transformation of the subject we were studying was to be expected. When we were devising the project in 2012, the term Web 2.0 still seemed relatively fresh (it had been coined in 1999 but was not widely used for another five years). The iPhone was only seven years old, and in that time smartphones had changed communication for many people. The accelerating pace of change is a cliché of technology studies and is nowhere more evident than in the internet. We knew the field would be virtually unrecognizable five years after we started, and tracking its developments had always been one of our aspirations.

What wasn’t anticipated was the Covid-19 pandemic and how that would impact the field too. Here too, transformation has been astonishingly rapid. Within weeks, a massive quantity of face-to-face interaction went online – schools, office work, universities, medical appointments, exhibitions, events, meetings, social life itself. Some of these and other activities that had already existed partly online – entertainment, dating, shopping, and many more – migrated almost entirely online. Suddenly, more of our life was online than ever before, and life online had become an even more central topic than we could have imagined when Ego Media was conceived.

In September 2015 Ego Media held the first of two international events: a two-day meeting at King’s College London of its sizeable International Network of leading life-writing scholars. The aim was to take soundings of the areas in which interesting and important work was being done on online lives and life writing, which would provide contexts for and guide Ego Media research. In addition to presentations of individual projects, we scheduled two kinds of collective discussions, which were also recorded and transcribed.

First, there were three rich thematic discussions organized around themes which had already emerged as key to the projects Ego Media was undertaking. The recordings of these discussions can be found here,³ together with abstracts identifying the individual speakers.

The Politics of Digital Life raised questions over surveillance and the dissemination of personal data, asked where power resides online, and interrogated notions of freedom and agency when applied to the internet. We noted the shift in the twelve years between the journal Biography’s 2003 special issue “Online Lives,” and its follow-up “Online Lives 2.0” issue which had just appeared in 2015. It was partly, as suggested, a shift from anarchy to surveillance, but also to a greater monetization of data, and critics’ awareness of the processes of datafication. The implicit ideal of a “transparent self” was not only a creation of the neoliberal state, but arguably a hangover from an Enlightenment ideal of shareable subjectivity. As with that ideal, online subjectivity has major implications for ideas of freedom – both positive and negative. The internet has both offered new spaces and modes in which to recreate and share the self, and amplified the preexisting potential for such self-transformation and interconnection. Digital social groupings are said to have reanimated the concept of agency, which had seemed finished after 1990s poststructuralism, and to have opened up new possibilities: what is agency without bodies? Without censorship? Without privacy? Conversely (but perhaps also consequently), the decoupling of identity from traditional social locatedness and the shift from local social relations to potentially global and much vaster virtual ones, while it has extended the reach of self-presentation, has also brought with it two kinds of threat. One is the tendency of large networked audiences, cut free from the constraints of having to share a community, to behave like mobs, expressing violence and vindictiveness en masse, in the form of trolling and shaming. The other is that if the virtual world seems to liberate agency, it can also seem to circumscribe it. Gerbaudo argues that digitally enabled activist movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy and the Indignados did not just unite in cyberspace, but coordinated the occupation of actual iconic civic spaces, whether Tahrir Square or Wall Street. But conversely, if people only respond to calls to activism by clicking on a button to sign a petition, say, then social transformation is unlikely to result. “Clicktivism,” as it became known, is but one manifestation of a new form of passivity specific to the internet, and indeed known ironically as “inter-passivity.”⁴

The discussion of the politics of the internet would have played very differently the following year, after the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election of 2016. We would have been talking about fake news, post-truth, the erosion of trust, and the uses of the internet to undermine democratic process – and indeed are still talking about them after the 2020 US election and its aftermath, in which so many of the major turns have been conducted via social media, adding Obama’s new term, truth decay. Nevertheless, in 2015 we discussed the lack of transparency about the uses made of our self-presentation by others, how our freedom is compromised if we do not know what is done with our data. (A pressing example is the covert selling of medical data to healthcare companies.) Given these pressures which the internet brings to bear on such terms as freedom and agency, we considered the advantages of using new terminologies. For example, discourses of “interruption,” “disruption,” or “intensification” may better reflect how digital media impact upon everyday life in a way that may not be especially susceptible to value judgments of their positive or negative effects.

From the politics of online self-presentation the discussion moved to the way politics and culture were themselves moving online, both in the form of heritage and culture being increasingly expected to take place there (in museums, and also performances, such as the UK’s National Theatre NT Live live-streamed drama). How much more so during the pandemic! Party politics too could be seen as in the process of migrating to the virtual, as with transformation of Labour Party membership under Jeremy Corbyn.

Time and Space Online: Liveness, Authenticity, Locality began with the issue of digital visualizations and how they are impacting on our imagination of time and space, and how the organization of material online was equally a crucial question for cultural organizations such as museums. Irony was posited as a strategy for indicating an awareness of other possible viewpoints. It was recognized that the distinction between online and offline was increasingly problematic, requiring wariness in positing value judgments on the “real” or “live” as opposed to the “virtual” or recorded.

The function of the internet in providing a virtual space for experiment with identity was seen as continuous with earlier, literary functions of fiction and life writing. (How does live-streaming from a webcam in your home differ from the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, say?) Entering such spaces can be a different experience for women or people of color, subjected to harassment or abuse. In some areas, online forms appear which seem to be operating in new ways (one example is online farming games which commodify players’ time). The internet is a scene for both the transient – the twenty-four-hour breaking news cycle and instantaneous communication – and the eternal – placing the self in a cyberspace (already an antiquated term!) beyond change or mortality (as when social media profiles persist, and even continue activity, after death). Yet such metaphysical conceptions of time are at odds with the attempts of social media platforms to impose a “timeline” on our posts and remind us of quantifiable temporal relations between them.

The third thematic discussion, Routine Quantification: Habit, Affect and Health, addressed the role of habit and repetition in online culture. Beginning by addressing e-health and the quantified self, the discussion moved to the methodological challenges facing humanities scholars as they develop research methods attuned to online practices, cultures, and media. The reliability of fitness tracking devices was raised – the ease with which people can falsify their data. Yet the technology offers a window into the nature of “dailiness” (who knew how many steps they walked per day in the last century?),⁵ and in particular of repetition. The humanists in the group, however, duly cited literary precursors for the quantified self such as Benjamin Franklin. Online repetition has a social dimension, as in the “ritualized appreciation” of posted selfies, often seen as a solipsistic genre.

Downsides of e-health technologies are the pressure to understand health as optimization and to foster fantasies of immortality, and also to mobilize feelings of guilt and shame in trying to “responsibilize” the individual to assume the burden of self-care rather than rely on health services. However, campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo, in repeatedly challenging toxic tropes, might be seen as a form of semiotic cognitive behavioral therapy, using repetition to change behaviors and affective climates.

Yet the benefits of health databases are compelling: allowing doctors to analyze how particular health issues affect different demographics, or, in the case of patient support groups, providing supportive communities that can relieve isolation and anxiety. The logging of symptoms electronically, like fitness tracking, creates new relations between subject, body, and machine. Sometimes these offer insights not otherwise available, such as making sleep patterns or seizure symptoms visible to the sleeper or sufferer.

The second half of this thematic discussion turned to methodology and research ethics. Concepts of text and author, already problematized in literary theory, must be rethought to address online content, often multimedia, co-created, and multiply circulated, and sometimes taking new and surprising forms, such as networked therapy sessions. Distinctions between writer and reader, performer and audience, producer and consumer are being replaced with hybrid terms such as user or prosumer. Should users sharing their private experiences and data online be anonymized, as in medical or social science research, or acknowledged as identifiable writers, as in the arts and humanities? Remix methods may be more appropriate for dealing with the eclecticism of the web. Humanities scholars may be challenged by the predominance of numbers over words in quantification technologies; they need to learn from coders and designers to be able to analyze new forms and practices online. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on self-presentation has been adapted to the web’s multilayered frameworks of participation. Scholars working on gaming have also developed methods for thinking about the activities and roles being performed. The discussion concluded with thoughts about quantification as a posthuman turn, if one with a history imbricated with both the University of London’s role in developing its logic and with the standardization of European postgraduate education via the Bologna Process.

The September 2015 International Network meeting also included two public Round Table events. The first, Identities Online,⁶ included discussion of writing pain, feminism, gender and sexuality, identities in gaming and social media, public and private in online lives, self-curation, online professional profiles and the posthuman scholar.

Discussing Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName, Leigh Gilmore spoke in “Social Media as/and Witness” about contemporary US examples of how social media can offer dense testimony supporting intersectional politics and social activism, bearing witness to violence inflicted on bodies and offering a feminist form of witness.

Julie Rak spoke about gaming and online identity in “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 as Life Lab,” asking what is the game you are playing with your identity when you play online.

Sidonie Smith, in “The Possibly Posthuman Humanities Scholar,” considered the professionalized identities of academics and the extent to which networked identities constitute them as posthuman.

The second of the public Round Table events focused on Voices and Ethics⁷ – including life writing and life sciences, performing life writing on TV, the ethics of local specificities, scholarly online archives, online living history, and testimonial cultures and artifacts.

Gillian Whitlock discussed her research on twenty-first-century testimony, addressing texts produced by migrants and asylum seekers detained in Australia’s Nauru processing center.

Alfred Hornung reflected on interdisciplinary collaboration in relation to his experiences working on the project Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience.

Craig Howes argued that digital technologies are bringing into being new biographical forms that demand critical attention, from Facebook “Year in Review” slideshows (with their potential for embarrassingly inappropriate algorithmic comments) to military drone operators’ “kill lists,” a biographical form of narrating a life which provides a justification for terminating it.

It was integral to the design of the series to include talks by creative practitioners. On November 4, 2015, the novelist and cultural critic Will Self spoke (in conversation with Max Saunders) about technology and the digital environment and their impact on the contemporary individual, the self and the psyche in culture, literature, and our increasingly digitally adapted psychogeographic environments. Self distinguished between McLuhan’s idea of a unified electrical field and the current dominance of what he describes as “bidirectional digital media.” In the face of the latter, reading as we understand it – a solitary psyche embedded in a unitary text – is coming to an end. A writer thinking about how a reader will or won’t understand a sentence now has to consider that the reader has immediate access to online resources. Philosopher John Gray argues that consciousness may have emerged as a by-product of language acquisition. What if in the future its forms will emerge from the use of media? Self speculated that WhatsApp and Instagram give an idea of what such a mediatized consciousness would be like. Born digital users are already developing a grammar of images.

Part of the argument of Laurence Scott’s book The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (London: Heinemann, 2015) is that consciousness is already being mediatized in manifold ways. Scott discussed the book in conversation with Max Saunders, and read from it, on January 27, 2016. The discussion touched on the usefulness of modernist fiction’s reimagining of consciousness in an earlier media age as a way into thinking about digitally mediated consciousness. Scott spoke of the effects on the phenomenology of space and time of platforms from Airbnb to social media; the digital gothic of online mourning; and the inhibiting effects on the writer of a consciousness of the culture of trolling and shaming.

Annette Markham’s talk on April 4, 2016, continued the series’ line of futurist thinking, considering auto-phenomenology, remix, and other methods of “Curating Future Memories in a Digital Era” (see #futurememories). Her work explores the question of how we negotiate the self in a world of embodied and embedded internet. She traced the brief, compacted history of the internet, outlining four phases. The 1990s view of cyberspace was as a utopian zone of democracy and liberation – a new public sphere. Online exchanges were primarily textual. This had a transformational effect on ethnographic and qualitative research, conducting interviews without bodies and their cues physically present. She identified a shift in the late 1990s to making the web transparent – attempting to erase the visibility of the interface – because people were primarily interested in content – shopping and news. This changed with the emergence of the profile. In 2006 Time magazine named You the person of the year. The stress was now on authenticity. Finally, as devices got smaller and connectivity better, we started to carry the internet with us.

She asked: As technology gets increasingly invisible, what techniques can we use to increase the visibility of the technological processes? Should we take control now of curating our future memories rather than letting corporations like Google and Facebook do it for us? Advocating adaptive and playful methods for analysis of lived experience, she outlined three experiments to explore the agency of algorithms. One took the phenomenon of “Am I pretty?” posts, analyzing the phenomenology of young women expecting answers to this question while the algorithms determine who will see the posts. Another asked students to become ethnographers of their own lived experience, teaching methods to study themselves while online (auto-phenomenology). Finally, Markham detailed action research methods working with citizens to curate their own digital futures.

Joanna Zylinska’s talk (on March 23, 2016), The Liberation of the I/Eye, addressed what might sound the same topic: the incorporation of media into experience. But she took a position in some ways diametrically opposite, considering the concept of “nonhuman vision.” Starting from looking at the machinic aspects of vision that challenge the limitations of the human senses and that produce images which defy human perception, she proposed the concept of nonhuman vision as a politico-ethical response to what Donna Haraway calls the god-trick of infinite perception, a gaze of domination and occupation “seeing everything from nowhere.” As well as being about perception and vision, the talk was therefore also about viewpoints, that is, about actual points and positions from which what we humans refer to as “the world,” or “the environment,” is apprehended and from which stories about this world (and about ourselves in this world) are narrated.

Sherry Turkle’s lecture on May 26, 2016, was on the topic of her best-selling book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press, 2015), which investigates how a flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity. Speaking to a university-based audience, she paid particular attention to ways in which social media were impacting on exchanges between students and teachers, arguing for example that millennials used to reading status updates before posting them found situations like meetings with tutors more anxiety-provoking because the improvisatory nature of discussion increased the risk of making errors. She imagined a future in which we put away phones and laptops; rethink the push to put everything on our devices or online; and walk towards, rather than flee from, boredom and anxiety, relearning how to daydream rather than expecting our tech to do it for us. Multitasking makes us feel we’re doing better, but we’re not, she argued, predicting that the next big thing would be “unitasking.”

In Careering: Reflexivity, Play, and a Life in Media (November 7, 2016), postpunk musician, as well as former Rector of Glasgow University, Pat Kane, presented his own experience as a case study of what he called a “media-ego” – someone living their life in the eye of the media – in his case both the music/entertainment worlds, and the world of journalism and authorship. “I have maintained a constant interest in theories about the constitution of subjectivity and agency – and a willingness to test them out in my own creative and commercial practice,” he said, and charted this theory/practice relationship that involved a shift from drawing on “reflexive” and “discursive” theories of self and agency (Giddens, Althusser, Foucault), to ones that source a “protean” self in the evolutionary imperatives of human play and creativity (Huizinga, Panksepp, Bateson).

Laurie McNeill’s “Remediation, Repurposing, and Preservation: Networked Archives of Digital Lives” was delivered as a keynote lecture on June 8, 2017, to the 2017 IABA Conference held at King’s College London. McNeill considered social media sites as new forms of archive, exemplifying new forms of curatorship; she argued that digital life writing followed the archival turn. The internet makes users collect vast amounts of material, she argued, much produced by others. She discussed the co-creation of living archives on sites such as StoryCorps, Pantsuit Nation, Humans of New York, as well as humorous versions such as Awkward Family Photo. Other forms of life writing archive include Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” sub-Reddits; autobiographical memes; Facebook’s Timeline; and the Throwback Thursday #TBT hashtag. She offered data shadows as a final example of the intersection of the internet and the autobiographical archive.

In New Algorithms of the Soul: Internet Celebrity Memoirs and the Programmed Life (June 9, 2017), John David Zuern analyzed print memoirs by a number of internet celebrities, seeing them as a form of Künstlerroman (novel charting the artist’s development), which often combine the genres of memoir and self-help manual, but remediate the print memoir in the guise of Instagram and YouTube. Zuern approached these texts with a combination of psychoanalytic attentiveness, as embodied by Julia Kristeva in New Maladies of the Soul (1995) and the concept of creative labor, as elaborated by writers like Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Isabel Lorey. He invoked Franco Beradi’s notion of “semio-capitalism” in The Soul at Work (2008) – the extraction of value not just from our bodies but our language and online meaning-production.

The final talk in the series, like the earlier events with Self, Scott, and Kane, came out of the Centre for Life-Writing Research’s commitment to exploring research by creative practice as well as academic study. In her talk, How I Was Forced to Write a Novel on Forced Migration and Forced the Novel to Migrate, novelist, essayist, poet, and translator Ulrike Draesner spoke on June 9, 2017, about life writing on forced migration and read from her novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt (Never Try This at Home, 2014).

What the creative practitioners especially brought to the conversation was a keen awareness of how the forms they worked with – whether fiction, nonfiction, performance, or photography – were all under increasing (indeed existential) pressure from new media. The writers, while still working within the linear, unidirectional form of the singularly authored verbal codex, otherwise known as the book, understand how the new media offer new multidirectional, multimedia, multicontributor potential. Social media theory increasingly talks (as Ego Media does) of “co-creation” of content by users. Social media have been described as, amongst other things, a gigantic writing experiment: “The world’s first ever public, live, collective, open-ended writing project.”⁸ Sceptics like Richard Seymour or Zuboff argue that while we think we’re writing to and for others, we’re writing to and for the machine, our writing read (by machine) for purposes of surveillance, control, and political and commercial manipulation. Yet the new polyphonies of co-creation, and the new formations of identity politics social media are able to mobilize, can be seen to alter the way we think and thus also offer the basis of alternative organizations of media, information, and society. The groundswells of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter are not mere Twitterstorms; they are effecting profound changes in the media, the workplace, society, the academy: and thus also in our selves and how we present and configure them.

The series as a whole engaged with most of the topics researched in Ego Media and proved invaluable in taking the temperature of some of the key areas of internet activity. It also brought us into bracing contact with a broader range of topics which provided a set of contexts for our research, as well as exposing us to alternative methodologies. Finally, they allowed us to engage a wider public with the research and with the importance of the questions raised to what used to be called the public sphere. The internet has superseded that concept and requires a new metaphor. Though more members of the public use it than have ever participated in political or cultural discussions in other fora, it neither functions as a unified civic arena nor serves a unified audience – another term its affordances and use problematizes. It is not a sphere and its users are not a singular public, even when using the same platform. If in some respects groups on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook have proved so effective at promoting community cohesion, in other respects they have aggravated political division. The epistemological chasms were made more visible than ever by the 2020 US election. Though other images of web and network capture the totality of the infrastructure, our experience as users is more fragmentary and mobile. In his 1905 meditation titled The Soul of London, the novelist Ford Madox Ford wrote about the different routes into the immense city and how people’s sense of human life had been altered by new technologies of urban travel:

Facing our glass screens, digital flaneurs can encounter similar feelings of the incomplete. We’re not insulated from the clamor of the attention economy; our street cries are personalized advertising. But that very clamoring for attention is what all too often distracts us from finishing a story, as we fall down a warren of rabbit holes, or pass across a Venn diagram of overlapping echo chambers.