Forgetting Online: Self-representation on Social Network Sites

This chapter investigates new forms of self-expression and the role of the forgotten for our digital remembering selves. New technologies of expression pose different challenges to the politics and performance of memory to those of traditional textual representation. Online self-expression is proliferating in many different forms across the internet, which raises questions about memory and forgetting, privacy and intimacy. This chapter will explore the different types of narrative of the self, created in third generation web pages, how daily self-expression impacts on our sense of self and our narratives of self and past history. This is especially relevant as the digital world has been renegotiating the possibility of forgetting, as the emphasis there is always by default on preserving and remembering; therefore, the place of the forgotten in self-expression has to be redeveloped.