Autobiographical Convergences: A Cultural Analysis of Books by Swedish Digital Media Influencers

Abstract

Autobiographical ConvergencesA Cultural Analysis of Books by Swedish Digital Media Influencers Gabriella Nilsson (bio) I've always wanted to write a book. I don't know why, though, since my dyslexia makes it difficult for me to even read. It feels completely crazy and very exciting with a book that is just about me. At the same time, it is sad that you can write an entire book about your life when you are only 18 years old. I've already been through so much. Nathalie Danielsson* Swedish digital media influencer Nathalie Danielsson, who daily shares her life narratives with over 2 million online followers, explains why she chose to publish her autobiographical book Jag, Nattid (I, Nattid). This sentiment and the increasing number of Swedish influencers, mostly girls and young women, publishing autobiographies since 2016, revive issues about the meaning of the autobiographical book in a digitized world. Although the rapid development of digital media is said to have shifted scholarly focus from "big life stories—long, retrospectively written accounts—to small stories—fragmented ongoing interactions" (Calzati and Simanowski 24), the autobiographical book still serves an apparent function, even for those who, on a daily basis, share life narratives in the form of "small stories" via digital media. Consequently, there is an opportunity to study the overlapping use of "big" and "small" stories, and in this article, I analyze autobiographical books written by a variety of Swedish digital media influencers. It is a common notion that the advent of web 2.0 has granted girls and young women greater agency (Handyside and Taylor-Jones; Formark et al.). Already in 2006 in Girls Make Media, Mary Celeste Kearney described how girls had forged a space for themselves as culture makers in digital media. In a "reality hungry" media culture, girls were able to harness a range of digital media tools to enact and represent themselves in various ways (16). As boundaries between online and offline [End Page 67] have become harder to discern, so have the boundaries between private and public lives (McNeill and Zuern xiv). In this media culture, the phenomenon of influencer lifeworlds is developing, as girls and young women in particular transform their private life narratives and self-representations into digital businesses through a range of visibility labor and narrative practices on multiple digital platforms (Abidin; Marwick; Raun).1 In these worlds of intertwined life and work, influencers both live and make a living from their life narratives, represented in their own content and in their marketing of various products (so-called "influencer marketing"). Julie Rak thus stresses that as scholars of life narratives become interested in online practices, we need to think about "online life as life, and not as the texts many of us are more used to studying." Life narratives should therefore not only be seen as representations of life, in the sense of finished textual products, but also as enactments of living, as incomplete processes of doing and being ("Life Writing" 156). However, the simultaneous production of autobiographical books and of life narratives online suggests that narratives of both life and living are needed in the life and work of influencers, and that different media may be suitable for different purposes (Poletti). The practice of digital media influencers writing autobiographical books can be seen as an expression of the convergence culture that Henry Jenkins described in 2006, and which seems to be a precondition for the very existence of influencers. In convergence culture, new and old media clash, and content flows between media platforms and competing media industries. If each medium previously had a distinctive market and function, then the media market today, Jenkins argues, has expanded so that the same content moves between platforms and creates synergies. In the cases considered here, the flow is between life narratives in digital media and life narratives in autobiographical books, which are partly the same in terms of content. I also examine the expansion of the influencer marketing industry to include the book market, and vice versa. In autobiography studies, the coaxer is "the person or the institution or the cultural imperatives that solicits or provokes people to tell their stories" (Plummer 21). With...