FCJ-180 ‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps

Abstract

Drawing on in-depth interviews with sixteen Facebook users, this paper presents a series of vignettes that explore cross-platform Facebook apps as 'tools' for self-writing, self-expression and identity performance. The paper argues that the capacity of apps to write in the user's stead - at times without the user's knowledge or explicit consent - works to intervene in and on occasion disrupt users' staged self-performances to their 'invisible audience' (Sauter, 2013) on Facebook. Furthermore, if such instances of automated self-writing are treated as performative, apps hold the constitutional capacity to actively rewrite, regulate and even constitute the self to suit the logic of the 'like economy' (Gelitz and Helmond, 2013), in ways that transcend the boundaries of Facebook.