Partners in Conversation: Ethics and the Emergent Practice of Oral History Performance

Abstract

From Wiki Leaks, whistleblowers, documentary exposés, and personal testimonies, to reality television, consumer databases, and social media, we are all increasingly caught up in a ‘confessional mode’ where going public is the rule more than the exception. The confessional mode appears in academic writing across the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts, marking a shift towards self-reflexivity, personal scholarship, and auto-ethnography. For growing numbers of us, Facebook, Linked-in, and FaceTime encourage us to connect, network, post, blog, text, and tweet even the most intimate details of our personal lives. Meanwhile, this information — about our ‘likes,’ personal consumption habits, and moment-to-moment movement — is ‘mined’ and sold from databases linked to our social media, our cell phones, and our bank cards.