In this dissertation, I examine how hypertext self-life-writing approximates and simultaneously alters many conventional aspects of print autobiography. To accomplish this task, I trace Western autobiography from canonical texts including St. Augustine’s Confessions to online (digital) versions of autobiography by early “cyber-pioneers” including Justin Allyn Hall (“autobio”) and Miles Hochstein (“Documented Life: An Autodocumentary”). I conclude with a brief epilogue addressing autobiographical features present in social networking sites (e.g., facebook, MySpace, et al.). I contend that digital autobiography often reproduces the archetypal characteristics of autobiography including but not limited to a narrative structure, the inclusion of verifiable events in the subject’s life, a strong tendency towards a linear chronology, and the finite limits of what can be included within the printed text, i.e., an autobiography that ends before a subject’s life is complete. Digital self-life-writing also relies on many familiar models of identity formation witnessed in traditional autobiography: work, family, friends, personal achievement, cathartic events, etc. In this way, online versions of autobiography have changed little from the textual construction of the self witnessed in traditional print autobiographies.
Despite these similarities, the multimodal and interactive nature of hypertext has the potential to alter traditional modes of self-presentation in autobiography by introducing in several key effects and features including but not limited to the following: disruption of traditional narrative patterns, incorporation of reified elements (i.e., digital media including PDF documents, digital photos, audio files, streaming video, et al.) of a person(s) besides the author, introduction of divergent genres (e.g., journalistic works, media reviews, et al.), disruption of boundaries between the public and private realms of the subject, and elimination of the fixed and permanent nature of the printed text. These hypertext effects and features introduce a communal element to autobiography—a dialogue between an author and a reader that is both literal and reciprocal. As a result of the effects and features of hypertext, I contend that digital autobiography both mimics the “self-in-process” that scholars of autobiography have claimed cannot be accurately recorded in print and establishes self-life-writing, historically conceived as an individual endeavor, as a recurrent public exercise.