Genres of the personal life, old and new

The personal sphere consists of both whom we communicate with and what we communicate about, in what form.  Throughout history our sense of the personal sphere and the personal has grown beyond home or village life and changed in relation to genres of expression and networks of communication for these expressions. Personal letters, love poetry, religious meditations and spiritual autobiographies, Montaignian essays, novels about social life, political discussions and activist manifestos, fantasy fiction, psychological self-help books, and many other genres each embedded in social activity systems have expanded the rich and varied sets of relations we call the personal sphere. Electronic mediation has influenced the circulation of these forms of expression and relation, and has created space within which genres have evolved and been invented.  Families or friendship groups, now geographically dispersed, are held more tightly together by email and elists or facebook  or skype than by previous technologies of letters or telephone.  Facebook, twitter, blogs are morphing and fracturing into subtypes rapidly, creating new platforms on which to construct and display a personal self among broad or selected groups of "friends" or "followers."  Anonymous confessional websites have created new places to share secrets and new anonymous identities, as have avatar populated second life and game universes.  Review sites, youtube, tumblr, discussion threads following stories, and Inews are giving more people opportunities to express themselves as connoisseurs, expressive celebrities, engaged commentators, or witnesses to events.  Political engagement seems to spread widely as it is easy to find place to voice and develop one's views and argue with others, sometimes leading to action and engagement.  In this talk, I will try to sort out and differentiate some of the many different things we consider the personal sphere and the different kinds of developments occurring in each of them in the last few decades of electronic mediation.