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INTRODUCING TECHNOBIOGRAPHY
In his Introduction to Cybercultures, David Bell argues that Cyberspace is created through the stories we tell about it: material stories (about hardware and software histories); symbolic stories (in popular culture, for example, films); and experiential stories (about cyberspace encounters, which are mediations of material and symbolic stories). Bell draws on the work of N. Katherine Hayles to define his three types of stories as stories about what Cyberspace and cyberculture are, stories about what they mean, and stories about what they do. Stories are important, he writes, because cyberspace is "something to be understood as it is lived"; Cyberspace is culture, "made from people, machines and stories in everyday life" (2). In particular, individual experience stories, or technobiographies, are significant because of the subtle and nuanced differences in each individual's techno-experiences (Costigan). This is an argument that Carolyn Steedman has made for autobiographical stories more generally: the purpose of autobiographical projects, she writes, should not be to draw generalized conclusions which can be used to theorize the lives of many, but rather, to understand the many and varied ways in which individuals negotiate social experiences. The aim should not be to universalize and subsequently simplify, but to specify and then render complex. Technobiographies, this article proposes, are kinds of experience stories through which it is possible to do just this.
This article, therefore, is an argument for technobiography as a useful method for studying digital experiences in general, and the relationship between online and offline lives in particular. After beginning with an outline of what technobiography is, I then discuss two important contributions that a technobiographical approach can make to the field that some scholars call cybercultural studies. First, technobiography makes it possible to examine online lives in offline contexts, and so facilitates moving beyond a focus merely on virtual representations of lives and selves, to a fuller understanding of the social relations of the production and consumption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Second, technobiography allows access to the context in which online lives are produced, to lived experience and to living experience-that is, what it feels like to live certain experiences of digital multimedia from the inside, or to occupy privileged and non-privileged identity positions within the micro-power dynamics of...