ABSTRACT
This entry presents a brief history of contemporary modes of self-mediation via forms of citizen media online. It begins by deconstructing the two key concepts in the term self-mediation: selfhood and subjectivity, and mediation or the rubbing of selves up against different types of media and interfaces. The entry situates the concept of self-mediation within contemporary discussions of selfmediation in the digital era. From this starting point, the entry combines a narrative framework with postphenomenological theory to map the changing relationship between selves, identities, bodies, media and technologies. Narrative inquiry encourages attention to how the self is narrated via discourse and emplotment to focus on the changing relationship between writer, text, and medium, and post-phenomenology adds attention to the impact of evolving material forces (e.g. platform affordances). Thus this entry narrates a material and discursive contemporary genealogy (2000 to present) to understand contemporary modes of self-mediation via citizen media. Early writing on micro-blogging explained writing the self as akin to w historical modes of self-mediation like diaries, where writing was—via humanist inspirations— primarily solitary, reflective, linear, singular, and relatively separate from the bodies and subjectivities of the writer. By contrast, empirical work on contemporary modes of self-mediation challenges this original paradigm by describing self-mediation as often collective, dialogic, discursive and material, interrupted, incomplete, continual, rescripted, transmediated, remixed, rhizomatic, entangled, and deeply enfolded within the affective lived experience of the online writer. This entry traces the material discursive entanglements and mediated becomings of the self – influenced by post-humanism – via microblogging, online fanfiction, and tracing through increasingly multimodal forms of expression (e.g. selfies, avatars, gifs, vines, YouTube™ vlogging, Snapchat™ photos and digital stories, and locative media). Importantly I argue that the self that is mediated is not a humanistic agentic singularity but rather an entanglement of material and discursive forces of class, gender, sexuality, race and citizenship.
