Autobiographical acts proliferate on the Web: personal homepages, blogs, online journals and diaries, hypertext autobiographical stories and anthologies, webcams, family album sites. My presentation focuses on the ways in which the computer as a tool and networked computing as a medium shape autobiographical writing and performance. How do the Webís hypertextual, multimedia, and interactive capabilities affect the production of autobiographical stories and subjects, and how might the proliferation of autobiographical acts on the Web transform the organization of experience and subjectivity that traditional autobiography both presupposes and helps to maintain?

There are two areas where we can note significant differences in print- and Web-based autobiographical acts. First, the organizational default modes of Web and print enable and constrain different self-representations. The linearity of the book encourages a representation of the autobiographical subject as unified, coherent, developmental, and organic. On the other hand, the Webís hypertextual structure elicits a non-linear, non-chronological, and multiple ordering of a life story and thus more readily represents the subject as dispersed and discontinuous.

The temporality of the Webóits openness to addition and revisionóis a second significant feature distinguishing Web from print. The Web enables the representation of a dynamic, evolving, emerging sense of self, of a self perpetually in formation. Itís no surprise that many autobiographical acts on the Web take the form of journals or diaries, in which the act of reflection is ongoing and the autobiographical project is anything but a final statement on a life.

Traditional print autobiography relies on the closure of the book to enact the closure and unity of the self. Like the mirror image that helps to constitute the subjectís virtual sense of bodily and mental coherence, the book and the written page define the contours and limits of the autobiographical subject. The imaginary book thus stands between oneís real experiences and the symbolic act of writing oneís life. Like the body, the book mediates between the present-ness of experience and the past-ness of symbolic memory.

What happens, then, when the book is replaced by the electronic medium? How is the embodied autobiographer represented in a medium which is characterized by fragmentation, discontinuity, and open-endedness? If we look at representations of the body in autobiographical acts on the Web, we see a certain anxiety around this question. Many autobiographical websites display both the fragmentation of the self/body and a movement to re-imagine and re-map the body through prosthetic memories, experiences, and representations. The autobiographical quest to narrate a self and translate experience into textuality is mediated by this liminal technological zone. Between the body, the mind, and the machine, there is a web of interactivity that challenges the selfís quest to reach a stable core of self-certainty.