The texts and subjects of automediality

Welcome to the M/C Journal issue on automediality. If "automediality" sounds like another academic buzzword to you, you are right. But it is more than a buzzword for scholars interested in exploring the significant role of mediation in auto/biographical engagement. Automediality is, we think, an incredibly useful way of framing and grouping scholarly investigations of the processes and practices that people engage when they mediate their lives and selves in a range of auto/biographical forms. We are incredibly excited to bring you this vibrant collection of research about what we are calling "automediality," but first it is useful to lay some groundwork in terms of explicitly articulating what we think automediality is and does, and why we think it is necessary. As life writing scholars exploring contemporary examples of digital auto/biography in our own research, we were both struck by the need for a new definition of auto/biography that expands beyond text, beyond narrative, beyond subject in any complete sense or form, to reflect the multiplicity of ways that lives are lived and recorded using new media today. We each found ourselves limited, at times, by existing assumptions about what auto/biography traditionally is.