Biography has a challenge: how to represent a personality in writing when digital technology can do it so much better. Virginia Woolf, inevitably, had already understood this dilemma a hundred years ago. ‘Since we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, we must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking glasses at odd corners. And yet from all this diversity it will bring out, not a riot of confusion, but a richer unity.’
Who will read your emails when you're gone?
Who will read your emails when you're gone?
Who will read your emails when you're gone?
Biography has a challenge: how to represent a personality in writing when digital technology can do it so much better. Virginia Woolf, inevitably, had already understood this dilemma a hundred years ago. ‘Since we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, we must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking glasses at odd corners. And yet from all this diversity it will bring out, not a riot of confusion, but a richer unity.’