In the nearly twenty years since the publication of these two ethical inquiries, the rise of social media, big data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have changed the landscape of life writing. Scholars such as Rak and Poletti argued that online identity construction erodes the boundaries between public and private life by creating new markets for selfhood as commodity, and it raises new concerns about security, privacy, and citizenship are understood (2013). Elizabeth Rodrigues (2022) and Helga Lenart-Cheng (2022) both published book-length studies on the implications of big data for the ethics of life writing, while Kimberly Hall has published three articles on the ethics of life writing in social media (2016, 2020, 2022).
The papers in this panel bring together these lines of inquiry to explicitly consider how these material changes call for a new ethics of life writing. The papers build upon the previous scholarly foundations but are also informed by medium specificity and the rapidly evolving reality of how life narrative is produced, circulated, and consumed.
Elizabeth Rodrigues explores how data modeling for computational analysis presents a series of choices for how a corpus of life narratives can be represented as a collection of discrete data points. Examining the choices that undergird and precede the application of digital methods to texts allows us to interrogate the potential gains and losses of such methods, especially as a field committed to the epistemological potential of individual lives, whether as acts of witness, protest, or singular creativity. This presentation examines the author’s attempts to build a data model for early twentieth century US immigrant life narrative as a case study for ethical approaches to data modeling for life writing studies, contextualizing the practical choices of data modeling within the epistemological implications of representing life narrative as data.
Helga Lenart-Cheng considers how AI-powered and AI-assisted storytelling is fundamentally transforming the craft of storytelling as more and more writers, producers, screenwriters and creators tap into AI to fully develop the depth of characters, manage complex topics and storylines, structure narratives, etc. The ethical questions raised by these new tools are particularly urgent in the case of authors who share auto/biographical stories, users who access databases of personal stories, and curators who curate these nonfiction collections. Using projects by Stephanie Dinkins, such as her multigenerational memoir of a Black American family (https://www.stephaniedinkins.com/projects.html), and Pelican Stairs by Caitlin McDonald (an AI-assisted memoir based on Covid diary entries), this presentation will explore some of the ethical implications of AI-assisted autobiographical storytelling.
Kimberly Hall examines how the material conditions of social media challenge Phillipe Lejeune’s formulation of the “autobiographical pact,” or the agreement between the author and the reader on the veracity of a life writing text in favor of a more ambiguous negotiation of authenticity. Social media has become the most significant and everyday expression of life narrative, and it’s demands for the regular production of content read as true to an author’s personality or character rather than to a faithfulness to lived experience calls for an exploration of what new kind of agreement between the author and the reader has emerged. Through an exploration of the rise of material responses such as ghostwriting services and aesthetic responses such as the genre of autofiction, this paper argues that an understanding of the complicated ethics of authenticity should be central to the study of contemporary life writing.