Elämäjulkaiseminen – omaelämäkerrallisten traditioiden kuopus

The article concerns life publishing. The new concept includes practices and activities used for publishing details and stories about personal selves and lives on the internet. Such practices include blogging, photo gallery or video publishing and acting on social networking sites. The author examines Finnish writing and video bloggers, gallerists and ‘facebookers’, as well as e-mail interviews with bloggers. The contents are observed and analyzed through the lens of multidisciplinary digital culture. The forms and especially the motives of life publishing are studied as theoretically separate, yet merging and interlacing in practice. Written blogs are ‘flavored’ with photos and video clips, video and photo publications are explained in words – and Facebook as a hybrid platform merges all possible forms of hypertext. Similarly, the motives – self reflection, narrative performance and play – can be seen as separate issues, but in most life publications they overlap and bind together. Often they are even impossible to tell from each other. In this article, a field is shaped onto which these aspects are placed. They form a new autobiographical practice that draws from traditions but creates a new sphere.