Student’s Lesson

Writing My Own Story

Student Activity: Writing my own story

We have all heard many stories, stories which give us some insight into the way people are, societies are and the world is. Stories like this are constructions of identity.

Some of the ways we communicate a sense of who we are by:

• what kind of story we tell
• how we use the first person (singular/ plural; frequency)
• the nature of our personal voice, its tone (assertive? energetic? desultory? etc.) and tenor of our interpersonal relationships (submissive, insistent, easygoing, guarded etc.)
• the kind of persona these combine to create.

Increasingly in the digital world, people curate stories of themselves. A curator is a custodian of a collection of objects for a specific representation. Curators negotiate the tension between history and popular memory and consider questions about who has the authority to interpret people, places and events to the public.

More and more people are curating (or perhaps should be) digital representations of themselves. This is seen in both personal and public domains. In his political career Barack Obama has used a range of digital media to curate his story. See these links and the screenshot below:

• Speech on death of Osama Bin Laden
• Obama’s Victory speech 2012 campaign
• Obama slow jams

In groups evaluate the story of Obama and discuss what it says about him. In what ways are there a “multiplicity of selves” represented here?