Youth, Life Narrative and the Self(ie)
In December 2013, the New York Post ran a front-page story titled âSelfie-ish: My Selfie with Brooklyn Bridge suicide dude.â A young woman had apparently taken a photograph of herself in front of a suicidal man on the bridge. The âselfie,â a now ubiquitous term and practice, refers to a photograph taken of oneself, usually taken with a mobile device, posted on social media sites (such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc.) which invites response from friends of followers.1 As many commentators have noted, the term selfie is most often associated with the photographs teenage girls post of themselves on social media sites as a means for asserting agency and participating within culture (Hall 2013; Harrod 2009; Losse 2013; Murphy 2013).
In the Brooklyn Bridge case, conveniently, someone was on hand to snap a photo of the woman taking the photo. The New York Postâs story went viral across mainstream and social media and wide condemnation followed.2 The media condemnation was levelled at the nameless woman, but more vehemently at the wider culture of narcissism and self-obsession that this woman came to symbolise. According to such commentary, this modern age is turning many young people into heartless egomaniacs, obsessed with their own photographic images and narratives.
There are a range of exaggerations and misconceptions here that provide inspiration for our inquiry in this book. First, let us start with the idea that photographic self-portraiture is a new phenomenon. It simply is not: self-portraiture has a long and varied history from daguerreotype self-portraits of the nineteenth century, through to the many different types of portable cameras (i.e. with timers) which emerged in the twentieth century. The digital, portable camera has, in the past decade, found a home in the omnipresent (and now with forward-facing option) mobile phone camera. The photographic methods of using a mirror or an outstretched arm or hand to capture a self-portrait were practised throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just as they are now.
Second is the suggestion of a crisis in youth self-representation. Self-representation cannot simply be dismissed or explained away through accusations of superficiality and narcissism. As many cultural commentators have noted (in relation to the selfie and more particularly the New York Post example) selfies are also an act of socialisation; they reflect a desire for social and cultural participation and connection, for visibility and affirmation (Jones 2013; Freeland 2013). Sharing selfies can also provide an opportunity to take control of oneâs self-image (e.g. consider Instagramâs filtering and editing tools or Snapchatâs timed snaps).
But contemporary cultures, particularly in the Western domains of the global north, have a deeply contradictory relationship with young people engaging in public modes of self-representation, as Jonathan Jones (2013) notes: âlike so many cultural phenomena into which millions throw themselves can be seen on the one hand, modern, democratic, liberating instruments of progress and yet on the other hand, with equal validity, as time-eating cybermats of the apocalypse.â Of course, the corporate powers which heavily influence the cultural practices of young people play a significant role in such perceptions. But the good/bad, productive/time-wasting binaries suggested here are not useful, and as Jones argues, high-profile public examples of self-representation gone badâlike the Brooklyn Bridge selfie-takerâbecome a convenient scapegoat for the ambivalent and often confused responses that critics have to young peopleâs cultural agency and use of social media. These debates run concurrently with broader cultural discussions around, and constructions of, childhood innocence, and link into cultural anxieties and moral panics around the need to protect children and youth from danger and harm (Cockburn 2012; James and Prout 1990; James 2009).
Third is the prevalent misconception that there is something new and unusual about a young person wanting to share his or her life story with a public. While technologies have made self-representation much more accessible, prevalent and popular, self-representation, through varied cultural modes, has been happening for as long as people have lived. Scholarship in life writing studies, sociology, anthropology and cognitive science argues that self-representation and the telling of stories from life are powerful components of and drivers of human communities and cultures.3 What differs across time and context is the extent to which the writing practice is self-directedâa private activity where the process is driven by the need for self-understanding in the individualâor public-directed, where a life writer records their life and what they see around them with a real or imagined audience in mind. When considering how a specific life writing text engages with privacy and publicness, we need to think of these states existing on a continuum, rather than in a binary. As we discuss further below and explore throughout this book, the audiences for life writing are incredibly varied: they can be small and localised, broad yet historically specific, or may be as grand as the historical record. The communicative intention in life writing is thus wide and diverse, and requires careful attention from the critic: life writers may bear witness to the life of others and to history, intervene in their communityâs dominant understanding of experience, offer themselves as representative subjects or speak for marginalised communities. This intention is then complicated by the contexts in which a text is circulated, where editorial intervention, paratexts and republication for new markets bring the text into different sites of reception.
Seen in this context, young people have not emerged as prolific life storytellers simply because of mobile technologies; we argue, and will show in this book, that young people have made a consistent and significant contribution to various first-person genres throughout literary and cultural histories. Allison James (2011) notes that âone of the most important theoretical developments in the recent history of childhood studies [has been] the shift to seeing children as social actorsâ (p. 34). Their contributions to culture are worthy of study in their own right. However, childhood and youth studies scholarship has highlighted a tendency for childhood and youth experience to be homogenised, which often denies diversity and individuality of childhood experiences (James and James 2004; James and Christensen 2007; Liebel 2012). We want to show the ways that life writing texts have represented diverse experiences of youth over time, and have written these experiences into culture and history. For example, the youthful behaviours, identities and, perhaps most significantly, the texts produced by contemporary digital practices can be situated in relation to a long textual history. This book makes visible a portion of the archive of young peoplesâ life writing practices in order to both provide context for current digital practices and examine more closely the contributions young people have made to the field of life writing both as practitioners and innovators.
We also consider how life narrative practices can be a means for young writers and artists to increase their participation within their respective cultures. We will demonstrate that the production of life writing for a public is a means for asserting agency for many young people, in many contexts. This means recognising that while young people may have the means to produce cultural texts, it does not mean that they all feel empowered to do so, or that these texts are responded to ethically by those who receive them. Rather than thinking of self-representation as a ubiquitous activity in contemporary youth culture, we situate it as a practice with a long and diverse history in which young writers have deployed life writing to communicate their experience, take charge of their own self-image and show themselves to be âactive participants in societyâ (James 2011, p. 34). Life writing is a key strategy young people have used to intervene in and reorganise how youth are perceived, and to create new spaces for other young people to respond and represent the self.
Further, life writing often provides a way for young people to negotiate and assert their citizenship. As Tom Cockburn (2012) notes âChildrenâs contributions to society continue to be belittled and devalued, and not accorded the respect and recognition of being involved in mutual esteem and solidarityâ (p. 201). Young people are active participants in and contributors across different levels of society, culture and politics (James and James 2004; Liebel 2012); and Cockburn argues for a âreinvigoration of participatory forms of democracyâ so that childrenâs voices âcan be heard more clearly and recognisedâ (2012, p. 201). As we discuss further below, cultural participation plays a pivotal role in citizenship and youth life writing. Life writing has been a way for young people to contribute to discussion in the public sphere, and to put issues on to the wider public agenda.
Youth is a widely thought of as âa time of experimentation with different styles of communicating and articulating identityâ (Stern 2007, p. 2). However, traditionally, stories about young peopleâs lives, like young peopleâs literature and culture, have been âwritten by adults, illustrated by adults, edited by adults, marketed by adults, purchased by adults, and often read by adultsâ (Jenkins 1998, p. 23). And within culture, more broadly, as Henry A. Giroux (2000) contends, experiences of youth are rarely narrated by the young. He writes:
Through authoring, sharing and responding to life writing young people have found ways to make their knowledge and experience consequential. Life narrative has, and continues to be, a powerful and effective means for young people to engage with and respond to the discourses that construct them. These authors have sought and constructed diverse audiences for their life narratives, from peer groups, intimate publics, the historical record and public literary culture. However, the utilisation of life narrative as a means of making knowledge and experience consequential brings certain tradeoffs, and this book explores how young people seeking to have their stories heard through professional publishing, subcultural and online environments must adhere to generic expectations and discursive structures that make their identities and experiences intelligible to their chosen audience. The case studies examined in this book elaborate the wide diversity of texts young people produce, and the complex negotiations and possibilities for producing alternative and conforming stories of young lives. Young peopleâs life narrative has played a role in establishing âyouthâ as a distinctive speaking position. In using life narrative for this purpose, young people are not alone, as a large variety of individuals and groups have deployed life narrative as a means of making visible their experiences and histories: indigenous communities and oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, women, refugees, Holocaust survivors, gays and lesbians, survivors of rape and child abuse. In recent decades, as scholars such as Leigh Gilmore (2001b), Julie Rak (2013) and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1996, 2001, 2010) have observed, life narrative has moved from being a cultural form associated with the lives of âgreat menâ to being a dynamic and influential means for people and communities to write themselves into culture and history.Prohibited from speaking as moral and political agents, youth becomes an empty category inhabited by the desires, fantasies and interests of the adult world. This is not to suggest that youth donât speak; they are simply restricted from speaking in those spheres where public conversation shapes social policy and refused the power to make knowledge consequential. (p. 24)
Our study is significant because it is the first project to bring the disciplines of life writing and childhood and youth studies together. It addresses two gaps in scholarly practice: the largely neglected status of youth-generated writing in the study of life writing, and the broader lack of close textual analysis of the texts produced by young people in the sociology/cultural studies of youth. How can a historical understanding of youth and life narrative contribute to our understanding of the current practices of life narrative in youth cultures and in online environments? In bringing an historically informed focus to the textual practices in contemporary youth cultures, our aim is to make a significant contribution to the knowledge base in a number of fields (particularly life narrative studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history and youth studies), and make available important historical knowledge of youth self-representations that predates and is contemporaneous with the Internet and electronic mass media culture. We use life narrative methods to draw attention to the practices of authorship and textuality behind texts that have more commonly been analysed and explained through youth cultural practices or identity markers. We have chosen a selection of case studies to present and complicate the notions of private and public self-representation. We aim to show a snapshot of the contemporary practices, cultures, genres and spaces available for youth self-representation, and then, look more widely to consider the...