Edmund Gordon has published a piece in the Times Literary Supplement Online about biography in the age of social media. In ‘Biography in the Twitter Age’, Gordon writes that, in researching his book The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography, he had access to “thousands of [Angela Carter’s] letters, notes and journal entries”. This physical archive, Gordon continues, is fast diminishing and may one day even disappear. Thanks to the rise and dominance of digital culture:
“The biographers of twenty-first century authors will have to examine their subjects’ emails, tweets and blogs for clues to their inner life”.
Gordon thinks that this will be a mixed blessing though. Because of the vast technological infrastructure that surrounds and penetrates our daily lives:
“we’ll be able to tell exactly where an author was, and exactly what they were doing, on almost every day of their adult life – but we’ll have a much poorer sense of what they thought about it all.”
To read the full article in the TLS, click here.
The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography is published by Chatto & Windus.
Angela Carter Online 