The Creative Manipulation of Time Through Digital Personal Narratives

Abstract

Digitalization increases people’s possibilities for creating and publishing a variety of narratives about their own lives. Think of people uploading their childhood photos in Facebook or writing their opinions or stories on a blog as an example. These digital narratives reflect the narrators’ notions about their identities and circumstances in different timeframes (present, past and future). They can also come to influence others and make them alter their own perceptions. We believe that these narrators also more or less deliberately wish to use their narration to modify the times of the actual experience (those of what is narrated and those of what is lived). We consider that people who narrate about their own lives more or less consciously see themselves as creative products, for whom it is a challenge to innovate regarding notions established in times gone by, in the present and in the processing of narratives in the future. All of this, as the reader might imagine, involves innumerable creative and persuasive possibilities. In fact, digitalization, which allows for the creative manipulation, storage and dissemination of individual narratives, is a powerful tool for the creation of discourses about the future, the present and, most of all, the past.