From diary narrative to the referential Self: how questionnaires and quizzes reshaped online self-writing

Introduction

For centuries, the personal diary has been the most common locus of self-inscription. The production of Self in the personal diary is typically characterised by several features: first-person narrative; the author’s belief that through writing they express their true inner essence, or soul; a bias towards reflections and descriptions; and the assemblage of lived experiences into meaningful stories. The very specifics of the genre define a kind of identity that is produced through keeping a diary (Didier, 1976: 95–110; Lejeune, 2000: 35; Martens, 1985: 66). At the same time, the practice of keeping a diary is technologically mediated. The technology of writing in general defines the formation of a more introspective and personalised self-perception, in contrast to identity templates common in oral traditions (Ong, 1982: 77–114). Moreover, handwriting (as opposed to typing) also conditions the formation of ego-narratives along specific vectors, such as increased intimacy and a higher degree of self-identification with the text produced (Lejeune, 2000: 28; Van Dijck, 2004). Increasingly, however, the practice of handwriting is disappearing from everyday life, being replaced by digital text in educational settings, in personal communication (i.e. following each other’s profile and exchanging messages instead of writing letters), in self-disciplining activities from keeping personal organisers to making shopping lists, and, perhaps most importantly, in the area of self-inscription.

Recently, therefore, the evolution of ego-writing has undergone several stages. First, the hand-written diary was replaced by its digital counterpart. This had a transformative effect on diary narrative which could now be revisited and edited at any time (Urban, 2019a; Van Dijck, 2007: 29). The transfer of the diary to blogging platforms, such as LiveJournal.com, brought forth even more novel opportunities for the world of ego-text. New technological tools (such as hyperlinking and reposting) supported the decline of self-production through the traditional soul-searching first-person narrative and promoted indirect self-narration.

With the development of social media, the practice of keeping an online journal was largely replaced by that of maintaining a profile on social networking websites. Naturally, this does not imply that everyone stopped keeping digital or even hand-written diaries, but rather that this practice ceased to function as a universal form of self-inscription. In the world of social networks, the production of Self quickly established itself as essentially referential, consisting in the declaration of one’s relation to other individuals and to external cultural texts, and relying on the use of standardised templates and software-generated texts (Eichhorn, 2008; Potter, 2012: 31; Potter and Gilje, 2015: 124; Schau and Gilly, 2003: 388).

The shift towards such referential self-production began long before the emergence of social media. In 1991, social psychologist Kenneth Gergen introduced the concept of the Saturated Self. According to Gergen, the development of technologies led to informational openness and contributed to the deconstruction of cultural narratives about ourselves. Dwelling in a ‘socially saturated world’, individuals communicate and relate more than ever before. This causes ‘the gradual shift from presuming a Self at the center of the social world towards seeing relationships as the enduring reality of which the Self is an integral part’ (Gergen, 1996, 2000).

The saturation of the Self in social media is reinforced by the design of networking websites, which promote befriending, hyperlinking, sharing, liking (as well as disliking and expressing attitudes by means of emojis), self-positioning on online maps, commenting, following, hashtagging, joining groups, revealing one’s daily activities (from attendance at events to running businesses), displaying lists of interests and preferences for certain cultural products and so forth. All these practices are seemingly not focused on self-narration but exist more for the purpose of relating to the narratives of others. According to the literary critic and historian Lidiya Ginzburg (2002), however, the narrative is inevitably self-directed. Her analysis of the policies of turn-taking in a corpus of transcribed everyday conversations illustrates that all dialogue is really the framework for self-expression, while the exchange of words and ideas is really the fusion of two self-enclosed monologues, interrupted for the sake of social convention. If we regard the acts of posting or reacting to the post of others in online communication as utterances of a complex polylogue, and then apply Ginzburg’s logic to this communication, we can suggest that the act of relating to content produced by others is only possible when it also provides the possibility for self-expression. In other words, displaying one’s relation to external content is a type of ego-inscription, although radically different to the introspective narratives of personal diaries.

It is worth noting that some functions of the personal diary, such as archiving memories and self-disciplining, are preserved in this new form of self-production. However, meticulous exploration of what used to be interpreted as the soul has become almost extinct and the first signs of that self-exploratory narrative’s mutation into an indirect, relational form of self-writing appeared in the era of personal blogs.

This article explores the role that the spread of questionnaires in personal blogs played in the shaping of an indirect ego-narrative. It suggests that their inherent language game and turn-taking policies, as well as the specifics of questionnaire-assisted self-production paved the way to a new type of Self which became dominant in later social media.

The original empirical data utilised in this article were collected from the Russian segment of LiveJournal ¹ – a segment which experienced dramatic increase in the number of users during the first years of the website’s existence and up until today provides the largest number of visitors to the platform. The corpus was composed using a snowball data collection method and includes the entries and comments from 27 interlinked blogs, 23 of which contain questionnaires. These blogs were authored by young intellectuals and creative professionals between the years 2003 and 2016. This work received approval from the Research Ethics Committee at the University of Oxford, and all texts from non-public entries are made with the written consent of their authors. To protect potentially sensitive content, the names of the informants are replaced with pseudonyms.

The love of questionnaires

The practice of self-writing is deeply rooted in a human desire to resist the transience of life. Capturing the momentary details of the existence and flow of passing psychological states allows individuals to ascribe meaning to their life experiences. The production of any type of ego-monologue is associated with a specific kind of pleasure: the pleasure of validating one’s life. Yet this validation is not possible unless the story of Self is witnessed by the Other (Sartre, 2005: 252–302). Despite popular belief, traditional personal diaries have always had addressees – real, imaginary or transcendental (Lejeune, 1993: 156, 240; Stanley, 1993: 48). As the personal diary transformed into a blog with the possibility of managing different real audiences, its potential for validating one’s being under the gaze of the Other increased dramatically (Serfaty, 2004a: 457–471).

A situation of limitless potential for ego-narration is satirised in Woody Allen’s, 2012 film To Rome with Love, when one of the characters – the Roman clerk Leopoldo Pisanello – becomes the subject of sudden and inexplicable fame. He is hounded by paparazzi, invited to exclusive social events and interviewed on TV shows. Pisanello’s interviews cover miniscule details of his uninteresting everyday life:

What did you have for breakfast?

Me? Er . . . Latte and two slices of bread with butter and jam.

And how was it?

Good . . . toasted.

Ah, so you prefer toast.

Yes, that’s right, yes.

May I ask you why?

I don’t know. I just like it.

White or wholegrain?

White.

Pisanello’s fans learn from his interviews that he likes to sleep on his back, prefers shaving gel to shaving foam and boxers to briefs, and that he has gastritis. Pisanello muses over spilled coffee, makes weather predictions and describes which way of scratching his head he finds the most convenient. Every statement made by Pisanello is received with applause and expressions of admiration. Although Pisanello complains about the burden of his fame, when it passes as suddenly as it had begun, he becomes neurotic and keeps trying to attract the attention of uninterested passers-by. Allen’s satire of celebrity culture draws a picture of an ideal context for ego-narration. In real life, however, the production of the ego-monologue is subject to strict social conventions. In order to maximise the opportunities for talking about oneself, it is necessary to provide fellow interlocutors with similar opportunities and to learn to insert details about oneself into conversations on different subjects (Ginzburg, 2002).

Analogous conventions apply in the blogosphere, where getting a share in self-production requires maintaining the balance between writing and paying attention to the writing of others. When bloggers become more popular – spontaneously or through careful managing of their blogs – this balance shifts. In this sense, popularity can be interpreted as an increased quota for self-production. Online questionnaires facilitated the negotiation of bloggers’ shares in self-production and thus contributed to establishing this balance. They also allowed bloggers to achieve their self-presentational goals at lower costs.

These questionnaires came in various types. Some asked users to build chains of associations, some encouraged them to reflect on certain phenomena, and still others invited them to express certain features of their personalities and to share details of their biographies through references to musical, literary and film works. At the same time, most questionnaires consisted of questions that hardly differed from those put to Leopoldo Pisanello, such as ‘How do you usually brush your hair?’, ‘What is the last thing that you ate?’, ‘What was your last purchase?’, ‘Which objects can you see when sitting at your desk?’, and so forth.

Answering these questions has a lot in common with the practice of filling confession albums. The confession album is a type of autograph book which contains a list of questions and provides empty spaces for answering them. Confession albums were particularly popular in late 19th-century Britain where they were used as instruments for facilitating courtship and networking (Matthews, 2000: 125–154). Although in the early 20th century the popularity of autograph books decreased, they were still sporadically employed for entertainment and bonding. In Russia, the confession book (anketa) crystallised as an independent genre after the 1930s (Borisov, 2002: 18). Similar to online questionnaires, anketa contained lists of questions, the answers to which individuals (usually children and adolescents) were supposed to write down in turn. This game simultaneously allowed its participants to gather information about their peers and provided them with the space for self-expression. Naturally, participants’ replies were expected to reflect their personalities.

The belief that personality can be assessed by looking at answers to the questionnaires originated from the spread of psychological testing. In Questionnaire, Evan Kindley (2016) explains that personality tests were initially designed with the purpose of selecting the most suitable candidates for military service and other specific jobs. Kindley is sceptical about the accuracy of personality testing but emphasises the unprecedented popular belief in them in the Western world. He notes that in the second half of the 20th century, questionnaires and quizzes claiming to explain to individuals ‘who they were’ became a widespread form of self-conceptualisation and entertainment. By the second decade of the 21st century, quizzes became one of the most popular leisure activities online. Kindley suggests that this was due to the appearance of a generation of ‘bored office workers’ who needed entertaining activities for procrastinating. Although Kindley’s main interest concerns questionnaires’ function as sources of pleasure, the general existential thirst for ego-narration, which online quizzes are tailored to satisfy, is not mentioned in his book.

In the beginning of the 21st century, networked personal blogs represented an ideal environment for the spread of online quizzes. During the same time period, market researchers as well as political and advertisement campaigners discovered that quizzes could be used as unexpectedly effective tools for gathering information about target demographics, getting potential customers’ contact details, and advertising products (Holland, 2003: 73). This resulted in a growing proportion of tests and quizzes being authored and spread online by paid-content users. The questionnaires found in early blogs, however, were mostly authored by bloggers themselves for the sake of entertainment and did not require any demographic information to be shared.

Questionnaires and self-inscription

Just like psychological tests, questionnaires owed their popularity to the belief in the possibility of an instant evaluation of individuals’ personalities by scanning their replies. Bloggers made seemingly unimportant choices (such as dog or cat, tea or coffee, laptop or desktop, sunset or sunrise), described the peculiarities of their everyday actions (i.e. swift brushing of the hair, unhurried eating or the pleasure of touching a velvet bag) and registered their preferences for various cultural products. Their answers were supposed to be read as symbols of their inner worlds. In this way, questionnaires allowed bloggers to talk about themselves indirectly, without creating habitual autobiographical narratives.

While some questionnaires presupposed interpreting certain biographical details as proxies for bloggers’ personalities, others were spared of any biographical information. Self-narration in these questionnaires was fully referential. They appealed to bloggers’ shared cultural backgrounds by asking participants to self-identify through existing models of Self supplied by songs, literary works, films or computer games. For instance, one of the journals in the sample contained a questionnaire where participants were asked to self-identify with literary characters. This questionnaire attracted 10 participants, who referred to 18 characters in total. It comes as no surprise that bloggers only referred to positive characters; 7 of 10 participants associated different characters with different aspects of their personalities and with different periods of their lives. Some replies provided complex references that invited readers to build the image of the narrator by merging various models:

Noble knight Ivanhoe and Snufkin from the books by Tove Jansson combined.

Some hybrid of the royal assassin FitzChivalry from the books by Robin Hobb [. . .] and Amelie/Assol’ [. . .] and sometimes Leto II from The Dune Saga by Frank Herbert. ²

Self-conceptualisation through establishing one’s relation to various phenomena, including relating to literary works is a common strategy of identity production (Bruner, 2004; Gerrig, 1993; Ginzburg, 1992; Hall, 1989; Murray, 1985; Puchner, 2017; Zorin, 2016). In the questionnaires, however, this practice was significantly intensified by a design which not only stimulated the replacement of direct self-presentation with their referential versions, but also made ego-texts technically easier to compose. While creating biographical stories worthy of publication is time-consuming and requires certain literary skills, filling out questionnaires enables the same amount of biographical information to be channelled in a quick and easy way. By providing bloggers with pre-made templates, questionnaires offered a more efficient means of self-narration.

Some questionnaires simplified self-narration to the extent that no effort was required at all; not even the minimal reflection involved in answering the questions. For instance, one of the questionnaires invited participants to read through a list of 30 statements about various biographical experiences and to cross out those that they had personally encountered. This questionnaire has something in common with purity tests which ask about illegitimate or socially condemned practices to evaluate participants’ supposed degrees of innocence (Linder, 2009). Similarly, some of the statements from the questionnaire invited participants to confess their misdeeds (betraying someone, lying about loving someone, stealing something, practising prostitution). Other statements referred to certain non-trivial life experiences (riding a horse without assistance, walking in the forest at night, being arrested, saving another person’s life) and situations of emotional peaks (crying with happiness, wanting to die, loving another person more than anything in the world). Resulting posts therefore contained various combinations of lived experiences reflecting individual life stories. Despite a very modest number of statements offered for evaluation (in comparison with the scope of all possible life experiences), this questionnaire opened a potential for composing more than a billion different stories. ³

It also provided bloggers with the possibility of assembling their individual biographies without making any storytelling effort. The posts resulting from this questionnaire do not constitute biographical stories in the ordinary sense. They lack most of the fundamental components of storytelling, such as time, hierarchies, imagery, systems of characters, positions and evaluation. At the same time, they contain factual biographical information concentrated to the maximum. Moreover, due to the nature of the statements offered for evaluation, the resulting posts contain numerous biographical details that otherwise would be unlikely to be shared. In these posts, every statement crossed out by a blogger functions as an intriguing reference to a thrilling story. Spared of all possible literary attributes, this form of self-writing represents the apotheosis of efficiency.

Along with promoting referential self-production and providing templates for biographical stories, questionnaires facilitated ego-narration by removing the need to justify it. The rules of the game ‘obliged’ participants to provide minuscule details about their lives. In the language game of questionnaires, narrators were routinely constructed as passive and disinterested. Typical framing of questionnaire posts in the analysed blogs included statements about their authors’ subjection to the will of the others. These statements were often made in an ironic tone:

I give in! I can’t fight anymore. Here are my answers to the questionnaires.

Resistance was pointless.

By popular demand – here are my answers.

So be it, I give in.

The very form of the questionnaire contributed to the formation of this discursive model. Forwarding a list of questions to another blogger suggested that one was interested in his or her replies. In fact, asking questions was a matter of courtesy, not interest. Those who composed questionnaires selected the questions that they wanted to answer themselves, while forwarding questionnaires to other bloggers was the price that had to be paid for publishing one’s own replies. Bloggers’ comments on their friends’ questionnaires testify to almost universal lack of interest in the replies of the others. A recurrent type of comment was a request to forward the questionnaire. Actual comments on the replies of another blogger were rare. For instance, when filling out a questionnaire Five Random Questions, one of the bloggers tells her readers about her travels, preferences in art, dreams, perceptions of particular features of her body and personality. While this post represents a concentration of biographical information, the reaction of the bloggers’ friends mostly consists in their initiative to create their own stories:

Only the first comment is a reaction to the blogger’s own statement. This comment comes from a friend who had forwarded the blogger the five questions and who presumably feels obliged to pay attention to her answers. And even in this case, the space designated for reaction to the statements of her ‘interlocutor’ is used by the friend for channelling information about herself. Five other friends simply state that they want to be asked questions. The context of a questionnaire allows them to be straightforward in displaying this desire. Their direct requests are only laced with slight touches of self-irony expressed through smiley symbols.

The rules of the game, consisting in forwarding questionnaires to other bloggers, secured the transparent and equal distribution of opportunities for ego-narration. Everyone received the same number of questions or the same task as other participants and was expected to make equal effort to ensure the continuation of the game. Rule-breaking was monitored and criticised. For instance, in another case, a blogger attempted to avoid creating lists of associations for other participants in return for similar lists that they created about him. He was denied permission to do so:

I don’t think I will continue the thread but learning the associations would be interesting.

No, I will write them only if you commit to participate.

The same questionnaire found in another journal also testifies to the host blogger’s attempts to police the game, with those who break the rules being publicly shamed:

Look at these freeloaders! I work hard every night to reply to everyone after yesterday’s questionnaire, while some not only fail to continue the thread in their journals, but don’t even take the rubbish outside don’t answer my question!

In both cases, the violators have attempted to have narratives about themselves produced without providing others with the same opportunity. But the existence of strict rules determining the distribution of the shares of self-production gave other bloggers the power to identify, criticise and prevent this kind of behaviour.

Overall, questionnaires formalised and simplified the process of self-production. They created a discursive model where one could get a substantial quota for ego-narration by making a minimal effort and paying minimal attention to the stories of others. This was made possible by the replacement of obvious self-narration with a disguised referential version, inviting bloggers to share biographical material that would otherwise be left out of their stories, providing ready-made models for assembling the stories, and establishing clear and strict rules of information circulation. This type of online self-production became increasingly popular during the first decade of the 21st century, becoming a standard model for other online services in addition to blogs. Social networking and dating websites invited their users to display biographical information on their profiles by answering inbuilt questions; entertainment websites, such as BuzzFeed.com, contributed to epidemic participation in online quizzes that make users’ results public; question apps, such as Question Diary or FriendO, and Internet memes such as ‘25 Questions About Me’ and the like, invited individuals to assemble their Selves according to the guidelines provided. In an environment, where stories are the main currency of the social capital (Van Dijck, 2013: 206–207), the option of creating them quickly and without effort was welcomed by the users. The evolution of online ego-narration has therefore been driven largely by users’ striving for efficiency and their desire to produce biographical stories without actually having to tell them.

Discussion

Empirical data addressed in this article were taken from a corpus collected for a large research project on identity production in online self-writing. The topic modelling of this corpus revealed that the exploration of the soul became increasingly unpopular in personal blogs, even though they had evolved from the personal diary. Although consistently present between 2003 and 2013, this topic was among the least discussed in 7 of the 11 years. At the same time, features associated with indirect narration, such as hyperlinks, video files and reposts, were used with increasing frequency. The number of hyperlinks quadrupled over the course of 11 years and the number of video files increased six times. Reposts of other bloggers’ narratives were also characterised by a steadily increasing trend. These paratextual elements were actively used by bloggers as additional means of self-production (Urban, 2019b). Yet the most subtle but vastly transformative form of indirect narration which defined the shift towards a Saturated Self during the first decade of the 21st century consisted of using the ready-made templates of questionnaires for self-inscription. Questionnaires were the first form of text where self-production through relation to external content started to successfully compete with autobiographical writing.

In Seeing Ourselves Through Technology, Rettberg (2014) discusses the reinforcement of indirect self-production in the second decade of the 21st century. She explains how automated diaries and lifelogging cameras enable the creation of authorless stories about individuals’ lives. Computer products and apps, such as HeyDay, Saga, Chronos, Step, Narrato, Storica, Evertale, Capture All and Narrative Clip can track users’ location, their sleeping, eating, working, exercising and even love-making patterns. They record users’ heartbeats and glucose levels. They take photographs every 30 seconds with a small camera clipped to users’ clothes, and with the help of the face recognition algorithm, use these photographs to identify users’ social circles. Most importantly, these products can analyse the lavish amount of recorded data and supply their users with ready-made stories about their daily lives. In other words, in the era of these devices, the work of self-interpretation can be outsourced to machines. Interestingly, most of these products are advertised as tools for facilitating introspection and self-discipline and improving users’ lives by helping them to correct their life choices. By guiding consumers on their way to a better diet, better sleep, better meditation, better relationships, more efficient work or more effective control of emotions, these products function as mediators in the creation of what users perceive as their better Selves.

The focus on self-improvement has always been at the heart of self-writing. This focus is linked to diaries’ historical use as instruments of religious self-discipline (Martens, 1985: 66). Employed for self-criticism, the narratives of religious diaries routinely articulated the themes of writers’ sinfulness and unworthiness of salvation (Rettberg, 2014: 5). With the secularisation of diaries, the ideal of religious righteousness was replaced by behavioural models prioritised by the moral codes of diarists’ social environments. Although taking different forms at different times in history – from a diary of a 17th-century Puritan aiming to recount his or her sins before confession, or a journal of a 19th-century girl written for education and preparation for marriage (Lejeune, 1993: 158, 217, 331, 344, 426), the assessment of thoughts and actions and the striving for an unachievable perfected version of the Self remained a distinctive feature of self-writing (Zorin, 2016: 49). Even early online journals kept reproducing the narrative templates of early religious diaries (Serfaty, 2004b: 4–7).

The practices of perfecting one’s life through the use of the aforementioned computer products and apps without doubt follow in the footsteps of this centuries-long tradition of self-inscription. The meeting of the discursive model of indirect ego-narration and new technological capabilities led to users prioritising more external aspects (such as diets, social connections or visited places) to exploration of their souls, but the general drive for archiving and self-perfection still remains the main motif of lifelogging.