Stories of the Self on and off the Screen

I will always remember my childhood education when my class and I would take trips to the library. A few times out of the year, my teacher would assign us to rent out an autobiography book and write a paper on the person. We obviously assumed all of the information was accurate based on the fact that it was an autobiography. Now the world wide web provides us with the opportunity for people to publish stories about themselves online. This has increased sensitivity to the multimodal nature of storytelling. Dr. Ruth Page, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, wrote the essay “Stories of the Self on and off the Screen” which focused on how personal narratives have been emerging through the web. Stories are now told on “discussion boards, personal blogs, as part of community projects, contributed to historical archives, created as digital stories not to mention literary forms of autobiography which may (or may not) present themselves as fictional.”

This essay focuses on three narratives available in electronic form via the internet and describes their use in pedagogic contexts. All three are autobiographies but formatted in different ways. These include a written memoir in which the reader navigates through the narrator’s life by clicking on illustrations of the body, another involves the viewer to navigate through the narrator’s life by clicking on a deck of cards that represents a story, and the last one is a blog written by women with cancer. Dr. Ruth mentions how these autobiographies do a great job of attracting audiences emotionally. The bad thing is that we cannot rely on the web because we don’t know exactly how much of this information is accurate. There have been several instances in which people have claimed to be writing about their life but turns out all of it was a lie.  “The tensions between role play and authenticity in relation to online identity thus draw fresh attention to the medium-specific reader expectations involved in constructing mental profiles of characters in personal narratives.” It  has become difficult to know when an electronic text is actually ‘natural’ storytelling

With the improvement of technology there is now an  influence of sound, image and movement within these stories. Adding in photos gives the reader a feeling of what the character is actually like. Even though this is added, it is not reliable. A man once claimed to write about his life as a young girl with cancer. Photos were included and he had many readers who had sympathy and compassion for this young girl. Sadly, all of the information was false. It is important that us as readers always remember that not everything online is real. If people lie about themselves in reality, what makes you think they wont online?