Biographies in the making in a connected lifeworld

Everyday communication has experienced a shift towards the digital realm and specifically Social Media, in which the use of pictures plays an important role. Photos are uploaded, albums and profiles curated and everyday moments as well as exceptional ones are documented and shared with others. The project aims to investigate how the formation of biographies transforms through these new media. The point of departure of the research is the concept of biography. From a sociological perspective, biography is a form of social order, which has developed in the modern age since the 19th century. As entities such as church, family, class or nation lost their relevance in the ordering of individuals lives, biography came to be an important social dimension. Through biographies, experiences made in the course of a life are connected in a meaningful way, as well as formed in relation to other generations and social and historical circumstances. Biographies are expressed and constructed in various different modes, such as narrations, diaries, letters, photo albums, collages, etc. So far, biographies have been studied primarily based on narrations in interviews or written texts. However, through the dissemination of camera phones and Social Media, the presentation of life stories have taken a more visual, networked and ephemeral shape. The formation of biographies increasingly takes place on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which, due to their modes of operation, play a major role in these processes. It has therefore become crucial to focus on visual digital communication when researching new or changing biographical practices. The projects aims 1. to assess the ways in which biographies are created on Social Media and the relevance of pictures in these processes; 2. to understand how visual biographies differ from narrations in interviews and analogue visual forms such as the traditional photo album; and 3. to analyse if there are generation-specific differences regarding these practices. For this purpose, we will compare three media generations with different intensities of usage and familiarity with digital media: 14-20 year-olds, 30-40 year-olds and 60+year-olds. Moreover, we will include comparative cases from international research partners in Brazil and Greece to estimate cultural specifics. We will conduct biographical interviews in which participants narrate their life stories as well as interviews that focus on analogue and digital pictures and the role they play in participants lives. With a specially developed combination of methods of analysis, we systematically compare interviews and visual data to assess differences and similarities between narrated and visual biographies as well as among different media generations.

The project explored the following questions: What opportunities for biographical construction are opened up by social media? How do they differ from other visual and narrative biographical representations, but also what similarities and complementary relationships can be identified? Are there differences between different age groups in different societies? Three different age groups have been compared: 14-19 year olds who have grown up with social media and are dealing with adolescence; 30-40 year olds, the 'pioneers' of social media, who are currently consolidating their adult lives; 60+ year olds, the 'digital immigrants', who are reaching a new stage in their lives. A total of 51 persons were recruited for the project, 39 in Austria and 12 in Brazil, providing an additional level of comparison. For each person, image data from social media was analysed in comparison with the analogue and digital images provided to the project during 2-3 interviews per person. In doing so, we developed strategies for dealing with large amounts of image data within the framework of a hermeneutic-reconstructive analysis. The first result concerns the biographical relevance of social media. Posting and curating images, especially on Facebook and Instagram, and to some extent on TikTok, results in image compilations which provide insights not only into the current life of the person concerned, but also into his or her environment, self-perception and biographically relevant orientations in a life trajectory. However, it turned out that the biographical significance of social media does not differ according to age, phase of life and societal context. The patterns across age groups in which social media are embedded in biographical construction processes are much more pronounced than the differences between age groups. Four distinct patterns emerged: (a) social media as a component of biographical collages; (b) social media as an arena for constructing alternative biographies to the one lived; (c) social media as an arena in which conflicting life plans can be paralleled; (d) social media as social space in which existentially threatening and hurtful biographical experiences are dealt with visually. Overall, image configurations in social media respond to different biographical challenges in the process of shaping one's own life. Images and their combinations can be used to express ambivalences, contradictions, emergent and unspoken aspects in a pictorial-symbolic way, thus opening up biographical thought spaces (Breckner 2018; 2021). This is because images and their combinations are more fragmentary than narratives, polysemic and allow for expressing contradictions (Imdahl 1994). This makes it possible to 'work' with images on biographies in an imaginative way, which is particularly relevant in processes of social transformation, where biographical blueprints for the future are imponderable and previous ideas about the course of one's own life are questioned or even shattered.