Introduction: Autobiography 2.0 and quick media life writing

Abstract This special issue brings together research on the self-in-relation from both a narratological angle and from the perspective of gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial and transnational studies. The articles featured here discuss new and shifting understandings of how we define life writing practices differently in an age of online expressions in various verbal and visual forms, and through the lens of family, broadly defined. In this introduction, we establish the concept of ‘autobiography 2.0’ as a particular practice of life writing that modulates identity and kinship through the use of digital media. This introduction addresses key questions we were asking ourselves and the individual contributors as we set out to theorize the impact of social media and the mediation of family and kinship ties on life writing genres: How is relationality mediated differently in an online context and how does this impact our ideas about family and kinship? What issues of privacy and property are connected to the online presence of digital memoirs? Which different reading practices do we need to bring to the multi-layered online text of autobiographies 2.0? How does reading online autobiographies create kinship ties among readers? How are traditional modalities of identity (race, gender, ability, class, etc.) destabilized by online life writing?