ABSTRACT
Everyday subjects perform autobiographical acts online as a condition of social media participation. Such autobiographical acts can be understood to constitute micro-acts of life writing that accrete over time into forms of memoir, or into cross-sectional purposive political speech through hashtags, for example, or which articulate new forms of social identity and social belonging through the development of rhetorical genres attentive to unmet expressive needs. The overwhelming number of texts and writers is matched only by the development and proliferation of new genres of speech, writing, and action. To understand these autobiographical acts requires, thus, attention to context, community, platform affordance, and scale, even as we wish to keep our attention focused as well on individual texts or utterances. This methodology proposes to allow for any number of such avenues to be pursued.
