What’s on your mind?

Aimeé Morrison, associate professor of English language and literature in the Faculty of Arts.

More than one billion people are on Facebook, with more than half of them logging in daily, and Aimeé Morrison says it’s time to start taking their digital life stories seriously.

“Facebook is probably the largest, most sweeping autobiographical project ever undertaken in history,” says Morrison, an associate professor of English language and literature in the Faculty of Arts. “It seems foolish, as autobiography scholars to say, ‘But, it’s run by a big company, and most of it is not very literary, therefore, I’m not going to pay attention to it’.”

Morrison says Facebook is still the “800-pound gorilla” on the Internet and while some academics are suspicious of large commercial enterprises it’s important to consider why so many ordinary people find it such a valuable place to write their life stories.

“Autobiographical theory is very powerful but it has tended to be applied only to elite writers, or writers in exceptional circumstances, or in imperiled cultures” says Morrison. “But lots of people write their stories every day. . . I think we need to pay more attention to these ‘everyday writers.’”

Status update

Morrison, who is currently looking at how software interfaces shape what people write about online, says Facebook’s status update prompt – What’s on your mind - actually encourages people to write more about themselves than they might if they sat down to a blank page.

“In Canada we’re very polite. We don’t like to talk too much about ourselves,” says Morrison. “What something like the status update interface does is ask you a question and when someone asks you a question it’s not rude to talk about yourself. It’s rude not to answer the question.”

Ultimately, the status update is “coaxing” people to write and is therefore supporting the massive global autobiographical writing initiative.

Too much information

Ironically, the status update on Facebook has also worked against personal disclosures. Morrison points out that over the last six months Facebook began asking people questions like, “What did you do for Thanksgiving?” or “How are you feeling?”

Morrison said, “A lot of people thought this was really creepy so you had a lot of status updates that said, ‘I’m ok Facebook. Stop stalking me’.”

Even Morrison admits to taking a Facebook sabbatical every once in a while.  But for a scholar passionate about the connection between the stories we tell and the technology we use, she can’t stay away too long because the reality is, millions of people are logging in and writing every day.

“Facebook is aiming to be the whole of your Internet experience.  Facebook does instant chatting, it wants to do all your photos, it wants to be your e-mail and your Twitter.  Facebook is aiming to be all things to all people,” she says. “We need to study that.”