In other news, I've narrowed my writing topic down to personal narrative/documentary on the 'net. I'm taking, at Kirsten's suggestion, a look at the phenomenon through the lens of Foucault's theories on confession, and Dori Laub's theories on witnessing.

The following is some questions I'm asking myself while trying to write this paper.

Update: I'm curious why the rest of you blog, especially those that talk of your personal life. Post in the comments, or trackback to this entry with your reasons.

Originally, I wanted to exclusively deal with personal documentary on video, but I think this might actually be too narrow a subject for the paper. As a result, I'm going to bring in (however briefly) the medium of blogging and support groups on Usenet, in addition to communities like LiveJournal.

What is it that makes people publish their lives on the 'net? Is it comfort of knowing that someone, possibly, is reading and identifying with your life / feeling what you yourself are feeling? Is it the individual urge to publish (something I covered briefly in my paper on blogging and manuscript culture)? Is it the act of confession itself, regardless of medium, that is important?

I engage in this activity myself, to a certain extent (there are aspects of my life that I very consciously do not write about here, for a myriad of reasons). But why? I don't kid myself that people read this blog and are entertained by it (though I admit to being conscious of style and diction, because I know people do read it). In my own mind, I write here to get things out of my head; to work out ideas, or simply spout off about whatever bee is in my bonnet. But, there are others who have a far more performative (NSFW) take on the medium, and put their lives - ugly bits and all - out for public consumption.

The question for me, for my research, is why? What is the confessional impulse behind the act of self-documentary? For Justin, linked above, it's his art; it is so central to his identity that when faced with not publishing aspects of his life to his website, he has a (near) psychotic break.

Of course, Justin's "sort-of" breakdown may itself be performance; there is an aspect of fiction to any documentary - or, for that matter, anything - placed on the web, thanks to a societal distrust of web-based publication (even among those who publish on the web), and "imposters" such as Kaycee Nicole.

So, it's still not clear to me why people - why I - do this. But what is clear to me is that the incidence of people doing this has risen dramatically since 2000 and the introduction of easy publication through Blogger et al. Yes, JenniCam and a handful of other people were doing this before the blogger boom... but a definite shift occurs around that time.

One area that I will also have to check out, which I'm not entirely comfortable with, is the camgirl phenomenon as well. I've tripped across them in the past, and they've never really sat well with me. It always seemed (and I realize this may be a bit controversial a thought) that they were slipping into the realm of prostitution by placing suiggestive images/movies on their sites along with an Amazon wishlist.

Of course, there's a flipside to this too, in communities like SuicideGirls (Wikipedia), which seems a very positive, user-run website that just happens to have porny content. According to the WikiPedia entry, they get 200 submissions a month from women wanting to be on the website. Again, not sure what to do with that.

But I guess that's why I'm a grad student, right? It's my job to look into these things and figure out why.

Filming a lover through self-documentary (SFW, it's actually about curry)

Autobiiogumentary

SEW - self-documentary of an OCD girl.

Student Films - Documentary genre

Justin's 'Why do I do this?' page