From the “Era of the Witness” to the “Era of the User”: Theoretical Conceptualizations of Interactive Biographies in the Hyperconnective Age

In the first section of the panel, Sanna Stegmaier contexutalises interactive biographies in the digital and hyperconnective age. Drawing on concepts of liminality, she understands interactive biographies as both performative and epistemic sources, continuing and extending discourses of transnational memory and archiving at the end of the ‘era of witnesses’ and in the `era of the user`. How can interactive biographies engage with questions of agency and authorship in retellings of testimony? To what extent do interactive biographies mitigate or intensify previous transnational frictions of Holocaust memory?