Measure for Measure: Moving from narratives to timelines in social media networking

Abstract

A variety of prose genres, from the memoir to the novel, commonly represent individual lives in terms of sequential narratives recounted by a single voice. Mapped onto the personal, this trope seems fundamental to the very structure of prose writing, capaciously bestowing an underlying, unifying sense of purpose around the numerous events and relations that constitute everyday experience. Distinct from this paradigm, cultural theorist Roberto Simanowski in “The Compelling Charm of Numbers” [1] criticizes Facebook's relatively recent addition of a personal timeline to each individual account as a kind of failed “diary in that that it doesn't describe - or record - experiences at the end of the day, week or month.” This paper re-evaluates the declining use of narrativity as one of modernity's primary symbolic forms, arguing that the increased cultural interest in quantifying social and individual relations does not necessarily imply a corresponding loss in critical self-reflection, as Simanowski implies. Rather, Facebook's timeline may, instead, be considered as following broader scientific concerns for building more objective, algorithmically consistent epistemologies free from cultural bias. Refuting Simanowski's own category of “technical naturalism” to describe these new epistemologies, I will propose that social media tools like timelines can provide new frameworks for technical communicators in their study of human interaction both on and offline.