Abstract
This article explores the aesthetic genealogy of the cue card confession social media trope, where producers create a self-portrait or vlog featuring handwritten cards to relate an autobiographical narrative. Returning to Michael Foucault’s theories of self-writing as a confessional discourse of the self that creates a correspondence of ethical perception between the writer and reader by way of contemporary theorizations of the demand for authenticity and consumability in social media, I argue that the cue card confessions constitute an important mode of self-writing that uses the visual spectacle of the body and the discursive demands of confessional discourse to invoke mediated witnessing as a mode of ethical engagement.
After years of nearly constant bullying, fifteen-year-old Canadian teenager Amanda Todd responded by making an autobiographical YouTube video. In “My Story: Struggling, Bullying, Suicide, Self Harm,” (2012) Amanda stands in front of the camera clad in a tank top, her perfectly curled hair flowing over one shoulder as she looks into the camera. The background music swells, and she silently holds up a handwritten index card that reads, “Hello!” As the eight-minute black and white video progresses, these handmade cue cards detail an increasingly macabre autobiographical account of harassment, self-harm, and suicide attempts that began after a semi-nude picture of Amanda was circulated online without her consent. Her own video similarly foregrounds her body, but it is partially obscured by the cue cards, and she constantly directs the gaze of her viewer to her written text. The cards are punctuated with emoticons, ellipses, and misspellings, highlighting the difficult process of narrating her experience. Although the circulation of an image of her body through social media networks had been the source of so much of her trauma, Amanda chose a nearly identical process to try and wrest back control over the story of her past. Moreover, she used a formula that has become well established for confessing similarly difficult experiences: the transmedia cue card confession trope.
There is a coherent formula for this trope, and Amanda’s example highlights some of its key characteristics. A cue card confession is an autobiographical account that circulates in the form of digital video or photography on social media. These digital expressions are self-produced, and the cue cards are typically handwritten index cards, sheets of paper, or whiteboards, which foreground the do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic of the trope. The narrative conveyed by these handwritten cue cards reveals something deeply personal and not always obvious about the confessant, who is featured in the videos or photos holding his or her cue cards. The confessant is most often a teenager or young adult, like Amanda, and the image or video also always features the producer’s body, either in part or in full, in a medium close-up. The videos do not include dialogue, but are often set to music, the lyrics of which contribute to the overall messaging of the video. Individual productions are almost always identified as part of a larger subgenre of the trope through the use of tags, titles, hashtags, or inclusion on a specific blog. Strikingly, a cue card confession is typically a one-off production, often differing greatly from a producer’s other forms of social media presence. Although Amanda actually produced and posted many videos about her everyday life, her cue card confession differs quite significantly from these earlier videos in style and content.
But despite this difference within her individual practice, Amanda’s cue card confession taps into both the current popularity of the trope, as well as its historical genealogy. Amanda’s video, for instance, is only one of thousands of videos on YouTube made by teenagers who use this same cue card trope to relate autobiographical stories of bullying, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. A similar method of cueing is used with the hashtag #whyidontneedfeminism on Tumblr and was famously used by first lady Michelle Obama in 2014 when she responded to the kidnapping of 176 Nigerian schoolgirls with a social-media-circulated photo of her holding a cue card that read #bringbackourgirls. The use of cue cards to report the speech of others has been used in awareness campaigns such as I, Too, Am Harvard and Project Unbreakable, where producers use cue cards to relate the speech of others. The trope has even appeared in mainstream television commercials for MinuteMaid Orange Juice, the Minnesota Travel Board, and menopause medication Estroven. Cue cards, however, are far from new; they were originally developed in mid-century America for use off-camera to prompt the speech of performers in live television and are still favored today over teleprompters for late-night talk shows. In front of the camera, cue cards have been featured in well-known music videos by artists such as Bob Dylan, INXS, and MaLLy, and in movies such as Bob Roberts (1992) and Love Actually (2003). It is no exaggeration to state that the cueing trope is enjoying a current moment of discursive salience. At the same time, it is important to recognize that it has also been used perennially in various media forms for almost fifty years.
Reflecting this transmedia usage and transhistorical significance, this article explores what makes cue card confessions such an enduring and popular form of self-accounting. As both autobiographical narrative and social correspondence, they illustrate a new stage of self-writing. In his two essays, “Self Writing” and “Technologies of the Self,” Michel Foucault charts a transition from Classical to Christian modes of discourse in which the care of the self moves from a primary practice of ethical knowledge to an immoral site of self-indulgence that required pastoral surveillance. In The History of Sexuality, Volume I, this line of analysis moves past pastoral to scientific and juridical surveillance; Foucault (1978) further tracks the rise of confessional discourse as a mode of governmentality, whereby self-knowledge becomes increasingly embedded in embodied practices. But rather than suggesting that contemporary self-writing in social media has moved beyond any of these earlier modes, this article considers how such modes inform self-writing in the present. At the same time, I read this turn to the social sphere as the primary site of contemporary self-writing as suggesting a new ethos for such expressions. Cue card confessions are correspondence, confession, embodied, and engaged in governmentality like self-writing of the past. But their primary aim is the projection of a subjective legibility governed by visibility and consumability. Self-writing is addressed both to an Other, and to the self, and thus offers, as Foucault suggests, a way of turning the individual and the social gaze on the self. This is also why it is important to note that cue card confessions are addressed to a public but not necessarily to engender a response. There is, of course, the consideration of engagement that is vital to social media expression, but I am more interested in how this form of self-writing constitutes a “technique of living” as Foucault terms it, whose significance rests in the action of self-writing—the repeated action—more than the response. And it is from this understanding that I suggest that cue card confessions enact the kairos of social media expression as a space of self-writing through the structure of correspondence, rather than its actuality. In other words, cue card confessions are, like diary writing, addressed to an Other who is not expected to respond. Instead, the act of witnessing this mode of self-writing, made material by the affordances of social media, enacts the ethical engagement the producers elicit. So though self-writing still evokes the “relation between writing and vigilance,” as Foucault notes, today that vigilance is both an individual and a social practice, and works to illustrate the nature of sociality and subjectivity in networked social spheres (1994, 232). Reading this trope through a reconsideration of both the theoretical genealogy of technologies of the self, and a consideration of its aesthetic genealogy, I consider what the persistent and widespread use of the cue card confession in social media suggests about the present and future of self-writing.
The Role of Handwriting in a Digital Production
One of the key factors that defines the cue card confession trope and connects it to earlier technologies of the self is the centrality of the handwritten account. Foucault (1994, 209) describes this writing practice as an “element of self-training” that serves as “an agent of the transformation of the truth into ēthos.” Ethical subjectivity, Foucault suggests, results from the disciplinary and transformative effects of the handwritten account, a tension apparent in cue card confessions. One example is the Tumblr feed Women against Feminism (2013), a visual blog largely composed of selfies of women holding handwritten signs that detail the reasons why they reject feminism. In a photo posted on September 14, 2014, a woman dressed in a blue t-shirt and wearing glasses leans in toward the camera, her smile looming above her handwritten cue card reading, “I don’t need feminism because: As a self-respecting adult, I am accountable for my own actions, I don’t blindly cling on to emotional arguments/propaganda and recognizing that a victim complex is not empowering. #womenagainstfeminism.” Red marker decorates the cue card, not only highlighting or underlining certain words or phrases, such as “feminism,” but also framing the word “empowering” as if to give it even more prominence. The resulting image recalls a graded composition paper with the instructor’s red pen drawing attention to phrases or ideas that need further articulation. This gesture invokes the disciplinary function of writing, and the perhaps conscious or unconscious cultural reference is to a graded essay. But this stylistic choice also individualizes this image. Although the photo is only one of hundreds of very similar photos posted on the blog, this style of handwriting makes the producer unique. Through her use of the red pen, she visually calls our attention to words that ground her own claims to a politically charged position and creates a visually idiosyncratic image.
The handwritten text further conveys an authority over the emotional account, as well as the affordances of the medium itself, an authority that is often effaced by the interactivity of social media. The handwritten text, however, also asserts an indexical authority that digital texts cannot claim to the same degree. Like analogue photography, handwriting enjoys an authoritative relationship with truth-value due to the physical imprint registered by the means of production. 1 A handwritten document bears the material trace of the hand that imprinted it, just as analogue photography materializes through the direct imprint of light. Handwriting, both in the idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation, and in the physical imprint that results from the pressure of the ink or marker tip on the paper, marks the historical event of the writing of the cue cards in a distinctly material way. Unlike the transitory nature of circulation or the seemingly ephemeral nature of digital formats, the handwritten text stands as a marker of a particular moment that survives in its specificity. This is apparent in the anti-feminist’s use of underlining in red pen or in Amanda’s use of emoticons: the handwritten account captures self-accounting exactly as it is written, idiosyncrasies and all. These differences within the handwritten account individualize each photograph or video, even when it appears as part of a larger campaign, such as the Women against Feminism Tumblr blog.
In the only scholarly article to date on this trope, communications scholar Sabina Misoch (2014, 7–8) similarly notes the significance of the handwritten account: “To write instead of to tell,” she argues, “means having more control over both one’s feelings as well as the disclosed content for the disclosing individual.” Misoch suggests that interpersonal verbal interaction leads to more unpredictable emotional dynamics, due to the visible signs of response from the interlocutor. The process of writing affords the producer an editing stage, whereby the author has the chance to view and process her emotions before projecting them onto the screen. The handwritten component of cue card confessions works to separate the speaker from the emotional context of the narrative through the process of their production. Moreover, by using the photofilmic apparatus, the producer stages a further mediation between herself and her reader, giving her more distance than would be possible in face to face communication. Misoch points out that although the cue card confessions feel raw and immediate to the viewer, they have already been discursively processed by the author and are, in fact, highly mediated. By further creating asynchronous moments of confession and reception, the mediation of social media, even in its apparent synchronicity, creates space for the producer to create, review, and edit not only her handwritten account but also the overall production of her confession.
Kairotic Cueing
Despite these multiple layers of mediation, when reading the cue cards, it seems almost as if we are able to access the producer’s innermost thoughts via the handwritten document, owing in part to the aesthetic connections to diary and letter writing. This intimacy, paired with the indexicality of handwriting, grants these productions a high level of authenticity, an affect that the producers rely on to assert authority over their related account. In her exploration of the role of authenticity in developing the affective connections of brand cultures, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012, 219) argues that the perception of authenticity allows cultural consumers to “feel ‘held’” by the intimacy generated within them. This personal connection, she demonstrates, extends to the amateur culture industry of YouTube, entangling such individual expressions within the larger matrix of brand culture. The tangible physicality of Banet-Weiser’s description of the intimacy generated by authenticity aligns with Foucault’s theorization of how self-writing gives the writer “a kind of immediate, almost physical presence” for the reader (2012, 216). Both scholars suggest that authenticity brings the producer and the viewer into a kind of intimate contact that can only be characterized in physical terms.
And as social media scholars Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2011, 117) report in their analysis of Twitter engagement, the collaborative development of communicative norms afforded by the social media environment similarly includes an ongoing affective demand for authenticity. Marwick and boyd (2011, 119) argue that social media fosters a form of “publicity culture” that rewards producers “for displaying themselves in an easily-consumed public way using tropes of consumer culture.” Marwick and boyd point out that social media audiences are simultaneously expecting authenticity and consumability. Or that authenticity is a prerequisite for engaged consumption. As Amanda’s video makes clear, cue card confessions are explicitly engaged with this aesthetic of exposure and consumption, and yet, the trope is also understood to present one of the most “authentic” versions of the self available in social media.
In their careful repetition of the trope, then, cue card confessions create productions that are both easily consumable and which “hold” onto the viewer, as Banet-Weiser terms it, through their claim to authenticity. This suggests that the cue card confession enjoys a unique kairotic salience that conveys both intimacy and social media savvy. Kairos represents the fourth dimension of rhetorical appeal; it is the expression of an understanding of the appropriateness of the timing, form, and content of expression. This is the opportune nature of communication, the right thing expressed in just the right way and in just the right moment. Kairos represents the tacit nexus of authenticity: the socially agreed on expressive harmony of media form, consumability, and intimacy. The effective mobilization of these affects speaks to a canny grasp of the rhetoric of self-writing in social media. Indeed, the rhetorical dimension of Marwick and boyd’s Twitter study is marked because the authors draw on theories of “imagined and actual” audiences to articulate their theory of social media audience construction, which is largely based on a concept developed in composition theory by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford. In turn, Ede and Lunsford were working through Walter Ong’s theories of the invoked audience, suggesting the imbricated theoretical concerns of media studies and rhetorical theory. Ede and Lunsford (1984, 160) stress that the primary task of a writer is not to anticipate what a reader might expect and then adjust his or her writing to suit that demand but, instead, to use “semantic and syntactic resources . . . to provide cues for the reader—cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text.” Kairos, then, is not just anticipating an audience but expertly navigating the medium specificities that afford engaged reading. These authorial “cues” work within self-writing to invoke an audience to whom the writer is legible. This further articulation of the complex notion of correspondence evokes Foucault’s theorization of the aim of self-writing as “bringing into congruence the gaze of the other and that gaze which one aims at oneself” (1994, 221). Through self-writing, then, authors cue the viewers to see them as they see themselves. Authenticity is thus generated by aligning social perception with self-perception.
Visualizing the Grab
Ede and Lunsford suggest that cueing helps define the role of the reader, and this notion returns us to the original use of cue cards and their transformation in use across media forms. Cue cards were originally developed for live comedic television in the 1940s and are still favored today over teleprompters for late-night comedy show hosts because they direct the gaze of the performer toward a space either below or off camera, creating a visual connection between performers or between a performer and the audience. This sense of shared perception imbues the performance with an effect of intimacy (Rosman 2012). This connection also relies on the physical labor of an unseen, off-camera body that develops a similarly intimate connection with the performer through the process of cueing. When the process of cueing is revealed, as is often done on late-night shows that rely on cue cards such as Saturday Night Live and Conan, it is a moment in which the apparatus of television production is revealed. This revelation of the set as a limited and constructed space, as well as the performer’s reliance on the language of another, is a moment of reflexivity that calls the viewer’s attention to both the constructed nature of the live television performance and the unseen labor of various bodies who make such a seamless construction possible. These moments of revelation also work to detach speech from the body of the performer, and relocate it, or double its embodiment within the body of the unseen laborer off-screen, often to great comedic effect because this gesture reads as a moment of dissonance.
The use of this reflexive function of visible cue cards outside of live television first appears in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary film Don’t Look Back about Bob Dylan’s 1965 British tour on the cusp of his emergence as a bona fide celebrity. In the opening scene, Dylan stands in front of a stark alleyway that is cluttered with construction scaffolding and garbage bags. To his left, the poet Alan Ginsburg stands absorbed in a conversation with someone else, completely ignoring the singer. Dylan holds cue cards of poster-board size and turns them over at a quick pace that is timed to the lyrics of his own song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” that plays in the background. Dylan’s casual dress and neutral stance are at odds with his obvious absorption in the work of turning over the cards in time with the music. He makes direct eye contact with the camera only occasionally, as the labor of cueing consumes most of his attention. He often works to adjust the height of the cards, or to shift the stack, and each gesture divides the viewer’s attention between the work he is performing and the lyrics being visually and aurally narrated. As viewers we focus on his body at the moments that his gestures either line up or create discordance between the narrative and the image. This visualization of the doubled labor of performance—here, both Dylan and the viewer are being tasked with a kind of simultaneous work—points to the labor required in meaning making. But perhaps even more significantly, Dylan points to the embodied materiality of writing and communicating.
The relationship between the body and the text becomes a significant component of kairotic cueing in other forms of visual media as well. In her foundational work on Camgirls, a term applied to young women in the early days of the Internet who used video and Internet technology to broadcast live images and videos of their daily lives to paid subscribers, media scholar Theresa M. Senft uses the term grab to define the characteristics of looking and being seen online, and connects this affective experience to the physical experience of being touched, sometimes inappropriately. For Senft (2008, 46), the grab refers to both the physical actions of capturing a screen shot—as was done to Amanda’s webchat image—and the experience of visual arrest of a spectacular image. In her extension of Senft’s work, Susanna Paasonen uses the concept of the grab of online images to explain the appeal of mainstream online pornography. Paasonen (2011, 262) underscores the active element of the grab, the two-directional experience of literally being touched or moved, and responding in kind. When we are grabbed by an image, she suggests, the “affective dynamic is contingent and often disturbing.” The grab is not always pleasurable, but the experience connects the conscious and physical experience of a negotiated relationship with another. The grab of the image is so often used to describe images of the body because it allows for a theorization of mediated physicality that such images evoke, but it also returns us to Banet-Weiser’s characterization of the “holding” power of authenticity, and Foucault’s description of the power of self-writing to bring the author and viewer into direct physical proximity.
The cue card confessions evoke this visual archive of the body to grab the attention of the viewer, but the grab of these images also helps us get at the physicality of both the bodies represented and the repeated physical gesture of cueing that allows the diaristic narrative to unfold. Although the cue card confessions are narrative images, they are also overtly physical and performative. The repeated gesture is the handling, shifting, and turning of the cards. The producer literally grabs and releases the text as image, and calls our attention to the body, while dividing it between that body and the confessional narrative it slowly reveals. This process creates a kind of titillating experience. Like a strip tease, the slow reveal of unseen secrets in the cue card confessions grabs the viewer’s attention and promises to fulfill the endless desire to see more.
Demonstrating a canny grasp of this communicative tension between the narrative text and the image of the body, some cue card confessions use this to advance their ethical engagement. In the assault survivors’ Tumblr blog Project Unbreakable, (2011) for instance, producers hold up cue cards that recount statements made to them by their attackers. In revealing themselves as victims of sexual assault, many of the producers confess a deep trauma. But in placing the image of their body in opposition to the statements of their attackers, the producers refuse the narrative of victimhood imposed on them by their attackers. In one black and white photo posted in 2013, a young woman holds up a cue card that reads, “‘That’s a lesson in understanding each other sexually’—the guy I was dating.” The woman looks directly into the camera as she holds the cue card. With her head tilted to the side and a determined expression on her face, she is visibly discounting the validity of the words of her attacker. Even more significantly, however, she wears a tank top. The bare skin of her chest and shoulders is visible over the top of the cue card. Invoking the rhetoric of slut shaming that haunted Amanda Todd, and which attempts to blame sexual assaults on victims who wear revealing clothing, this producer assertively bares her body to challenge such discourse. Refusing to be educated by the “lesson” of either her attacker or discourses of victim blaming, this woman challenges the viewer to accept both her ownership of her sexuality and her experience as a victim of sexual assault. She cues the viewer to see her appropriately and, at the same time, to correlate social perception not with the abuser, represented in the recounted speech, but with the producer, who stares back at the viewer as if to invite or challenge the intimacy of engagement.
The Ethos of Mediation
In a similar manner, the I, Too, Am Harvard Tumblr blog (2014) features black Harvard students whose cue cards cite the speech of others that marginalizes their identity as students at the most elite university in the country through comments of racial microaggression. In one of the photographs, a young woman wearing a white sweater stands against an all-white concrete wall. She holds up a small whiteboard in front of her chest, and the red handwritten text on the board reads, “Don’t you wish you were white like the rest of us?—Old friend.” To the right of her body, at the same level as her head, the hashtag #itooamharvard has been superimposed in black over the white wall. The woman looks directly into the camera with a slightly bemused expression, as if just remembering the statement recorded on the whiteboard. The brilliant aesthetics of the photograph invoke a visual rendering of the statement: the all-white background, the white sweater, and the whiteboard surround and almost envelop the woman. Moving against this almost literal whitewashing that the campaign reacts against, the viewer’s eye moves from the dark red text up and away from the vast expanse of white and toward the woman’s frank expression, and her dark wavy hair that draws the eye right to the hashtag. The woman’s face and hair counteract the oppressive feeling of whiteness in the frame, leaving the eye with moments of relief and particularity that the all-white background denies. What the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign visualizes is the double bind of perception for embodied identities. By cueing the viewer to repeat or reject the microaggressions lodged against them, the producers use the grab of their images as self-writing to cue the viewer into correspondence with the gaze to which they are continuously subjected, bringing the viewer’s immediate attention to the ethical implications of such a gesture.
What these cue card confessions suggest is that viewing itself has a significant ethical dimension crucial to self-writing. Jonathan Ong (2012, 180) takes up this question of the “‘circulation of meaning’ across moments of text/production/reception,” to attend to the complex ways in which identity must be negotiated and established in its mediation. Rather than focusing solely on the viewer, or the ethical responsibilities of the producers of live television, Ong argues for greater attention to those on the other side of the camera. 2 These sufferers provide the “human cost” element of news coverage, and as Ong’s work points out, these “sufferers” are often constructed as “non-Western others” who serve to evoke an emotional response from viewers at the same time that they function to distance the impact of the event itself. By overlooking the context of meaning for these central figures, mediation theory essentially works to reinscribe the process of othering enacted by live television.
Ong’s work suggests an autoethnographic dimension to mediation applicable to an analysis of cue card confessions. This dimension is significant because so many of the confessions work collectively through blogs, or metadata grouping, to assert a form of social self-writing. The confessions ask us to bear witness not only to individual experiences as larger social and political truths but also to the power of mediation within social media to enact or deconstruct such conditions. The I, Too, Am Harvard photographs recognize that the visual representation of certain bodies, and black bodies in particular, invokes a kind of representative discourse. And, indeed, the vast majority of cue card confessions express a social position that marginalizes the producer. As a result of actions such as bullying or sexual assault, or a political position such as anti-feminism, the cue cards confess both an individual and a social truth. Invoking the ethos of “the personal is political” of feminist movements, the autoethnographic act allows the producer to visualize the “process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual” as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1991, 1241) has defined it. This is one of the key characteristics of autoethnographic speech as a form of relational ethics, as Carolyn Ellis et. al. (2011, 280) have defined the subgenre of autobiographical discourse. Autoethnography is a process of witnessing that grants “the ability for participants and readers to observe and, consequently, better testify on behalf of an event, problem, or experience,” creating a method by which the personal has the power to become political. This formulation asserts that the process of both producing and viewing autoethnographic accounts is a form of “witnessing” that marks the validity of the event or experience itself, and the authority to stand as witness to it. Within this context, autoethnographic productions anticipate the kairotic demands of social media for an authentic expression that forges intimacy. Indeed, psychologist Jürgen Kremer (2003, 3) refers to autoethnography as a “practice of radical presence,” recalling Foucault’s notion of correspondence bringing the writer into a direct visual relationship with the reader. But by using both a collection of self-portraits and the cited speech of others on the cue cards as forms of autoethnography, the producers of these compilations use self-writing to adjust the gaze aimed not only at them but also at the larger social group of which they are a part.
But in this invocation of the ethical responsibility of viewing cue card confessions, it is also important to attend to the confessional nature of the self-writing presented. In Misoch’s (2014, 5) study of cue card confession videos, she qualitatively analyzed more than 6,000 examples and summarized that “these videos do not serve purposes of ‘classical’ self-presentation; rather, they conduce confessions.” Cue card confessions are a form of public discourse intended for an interlocutor who may be personally known, and who will certainly include those that are unknown and anonymous. Despite this assertion, Misoch refers to the videos as “card stories,” neglecting the specific dynamics of confessional communication that she herself identifies. Confession is a form of self-accounting that is authorized not only by the speaking subject but also through an intimate intersubjective exchange by which confession becomes legible as a defining discourse of the self as Foucault (1978, 61–62) maintains. This implies that the individual only becomes legible in relation to the social by way of discourse and thereby depends on cultural legibility to enact a process of personal emergence. Put another way, it is only through recognition from the other that the individual becomes legible as a subject as Judith Butler (2005, 21-22) has argued. This interlocutionary function is apparent particularly in the videos, which almost always invoke an addressee directly, such as when Amanda writes, “I’m going to tell you my never ending story.”
As a technology of the self, confession requires interlocution: a performance from both a confessant and a confessor who first witnesses the confession, and then enacts a discursive response. But as film scholar Michael Renov (2004, 200) argues, despite the confessional nature of their narratives, the process of producing and editing confessional videos allows the producer to usurp the interlocutionary function through a process that he calls enunciation. Through the watching required by the mirroring function of the computer screen, the producer of a confessional video, or by further extension a digital photograph, serves as the first audience. Through the further procedures of revision and editing, the producer also plays the role of interlocutor. The cue card confessants write and produce for themselves first, and only publicly circulate their confessions after the process of enunciation, creating an emotional distance for themselves while forging a deep ethical engagement with their viewers through the authenticity and intimacy demanded by confessional speech.
The Spectacle of Penance
But there is also a further visual dynamic to this mode of self-writing that connects cue card confessions to the relationship between the body and penance in the early Christian tradition, as Foucault has explored. Whereas in the Classical period, control of the body was a practice of care that led to a greater knowledge of self achieved in conjunction with the practice of self-writing, Foucault indicates that this relationship becomes inverted in the Christian tradition. Instead of knowing the self through the care of the body, in early Christianity, one used a renunciation of the body to publicly broadcast the process of self-knowledge. The most extreme example Foucault (1994, 243–44) notes, and one that connects to Amanda’s revelation of self-harm, is that of penance, which becomes “not nominal but theatrical” through a process Foucault terms exomologesis, whereby one’s status as a penitent “must be visibly represented and accompanied by others who recognize the ritual.” This performative and embodied element suggests that penance became a kind of public visual spectacle.
And the spectacle, as sociologist Guy Debord asserts, is particularly suited to a public practice of self-accounting. He argues that the spectacle is the visual manifestation of our own conditions of alienation in the face of structures of power that determine not just conditions of labor but the social relations on which such connections are dependent (Debord 1983, 29–32). Here, Debord invokes the larger cultural logics of mediation, and suggests that the relational affordance between media forms and social perception alters our relationship to perspective as a whole. Debord offers a largely cynical view of the function of such changes and argues that spectacular images do not actually call our attention to the function of mediation but work to replace all other forms of perception so that the spectacular image becomes more real than the actual bodies it captures (1982, 36). This is the mediatization that Amanda works to counteract in her video and the function that is called to our attention when the actual bodies of cuers are revealed on live television.
This spectacular function of confession is especially apparent in Amanda’s self-account, which recounts the vulnerability she faced as a result of the circulation of an image of her body. Amanda uses the cue cards to demonstrate how an image began to autobiographically represent her not just as a person but as a particular type of person. The early portion of her cue card confession covers how an image of her body came to serve as a tipping point for later bullying behavior. She writes,
In 7th grade I would go with friends on webcam Meet and talk to new people. I got called stunning, beautiful, perfect etc . . . He wanted me to flash . . . So I did . . . 1 year later . . . I got a msg on facebook From him . . . don’t know how he knew me. . . . It said . . . If you don’t put on a show for me I will send ur boobs He knew my address, school relatives, friends family names. Christmas break . . . Knock at my door at 4am . . . It was the police . . . my photo was sent to everyone.
The dangerous potential of such spectacles is apparent in Amanda’s case in particular; the image of her exposed body circulated beyond her control with a kind of pernicious permanence, but it was also the record of a brief moment, a live encounter that was supposed to pass away into memory. Instead, it endured and persisted in its circulation. This image became a spectacle of her identity, and came to represent her as both vulnerable and sexually available, two factors that characterized her later treatment by lovers and enemies. This transformation of her identity was one she found almost impossible to escape.
But the spectacle of penance also serves a further function, Foucault suggests, that Amanda’s video betokens. Foucault (1994, 245) writes that while penance is confessional, its public embodiment also represents “the affect of change, of rupture with self, [and] past . . . it represents a break with one’s past identity.” Amanda engages the power of that particular image through the very deliberate positioning of her body within her own video. Although her body is front and center, the cue cards cover the majority of her chest, and the words almost literally shield her breasts from the voyeuristic gaze. But she also, interestingly, frames the majority of her head out of the video. She is visible but also partially hidden, as if through the framing, she reasserts control over the exposure of her body. This framing seems to suggest that while she authors the spectacle of her penance, she is also attempting to author the conditions of her transformation away from that past identity through the process of self-writing.
As Amanda’s video and all of the previous examples illustrate, the cue card confession trope is an interesting case study because it makes visible the ways in which the aesthetics of visual culture are specifically deployed to enact ethical engagement with dispersed and anonymous interlocutors. Beneath their deceptively simple surface, the cue card confessions enact the larger rhetorical stakes of social media practice. Their deployment reflects a sophisticated understanding of the multiplicity of audiences and a masterful demonstration of how modes of engagement from older media traditions can be used to enact a new form of engagement, one I am calling the mediated witnessing of social media. Cue card confessions are not comprehensive records of a life, nor are they offering an articulate form of political response that can be mobilized within the affordances of social media platforms. In Amanda’s final cue card reading, “I have nobody. I need someone ☹,” she asks the viewer to empathize with her position, but she does not create a direct call to action. Indeed, the overwhelming response to the video did not alter her decision to take her own life. The viewer of the cue card confessions is asked to bear witness to a form of suffering that often has a political dimension: racism, sexism, bullying, and sexual assault, which all bear a direct relationship with identity. The audience is asked to recognize how identity operates in relation to the rhetoric of those politics but is not given a clear context for an appropriate response. In fact, like many social media tropes, the repetition of the trope rather than direct engagement is implicitly indicated as the most effective and ethical form of participation. Thus, the I, Too, Am Harvard Tumblr feed has become a hashtag and a Twitter handle, and Project Unbreakable invites submissions or replications of its format. Here, I am not suggesting that individual enactments do not offer overt directions for engagement; some in fact do. Rather, the trope itself, and its deployment in various movements that often seem at cross-purposes with one another, invokes a cultural ethos for which there is no one determined responsive action. Instead, the cue card confession trope asks audiences simply to enact a materially legible form of witnessing.
This is perhaps why Misoch uses the term stories to define the cue card confessions; they are difficult to discursively pin down because of their layered valences within the acts of production and circulation. What they enact through kairotic self-writing is an imagined witness who will validate both a confessed experience, and the larger social issues to which such an experience points. In this way, the autoethnographic function of such self-writing does not just serve the individual identity represented. Instead, the cue card confessions bear witness to the entanglement between structures of power and mediatized representation, and the ways in which this relationship is enacted discursively. Through the creation of visual spectacles that grab and hold us, the producers of cue card confessions ask not for an interlocutor but a witness whose ethical perception will align with their own.
I have personally struggled with the painful ending of Amanda Todd’s video. The millions of views and thousands of comments her video has accrued cannot negate the finality of her suicide. Her cue card confession would have presumably connected her with many people willing to be her “someone.” Such an act, such intimacy, however, had betrayed her before. Interactivity, she had learned, could be dangerous, even harmful. And yet, even that fact does not explain the complexity of her decision to take her own life and leads nowhere productive for either this analysis or her memory. What I have come to understand is that Amanda was asking for someone, but perhaps she was asking for someone to bear witness to who she really was. Not just a screen shot of bared breasts, not just a victim of bullying, and not just a suicidal teen, but someone who was all of these things and not reducible to any of them. Amanda was not asking, then, for an interlocutor, or an audience, but for a witness who would really see her, and see the validity and authenticity of her account, and all that it represented, both in her life and after her death.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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