Illness Narrative and the Digital Memory - Herrndorf’s Work and Structure

Abstract

In the contemporary digital ecosystem, illness becomes exceptionally visible, narratable, and surveilled. This is one of the impacts of the digital turn, allowing individuals to participate in freedom of expression on a global scale. Digital media, with the rise of social media, has also transformed how we communicate and interact with each other, changing the way we form communities and share ideas (Mandoslessi, 2024). Life has become increasingly digitized. Social media and platforms such as blogs, vlogs, Instagram, Facebook, and X have produced a new kind of digital memory, a technologically mediated mode of how patients present themselves and how audiences, readers, and subscribers understand their sufferings.

The aim of this paper lies at the intersection of illness narrative and digital writing, which leads to an examination of the impact of digital media and digital culture through an engagement with the narrative text of Wolfgang Herrndorf’s digital blog titled Work and Structure (2013). The digital blog functions as a tool for recording the present into the past and transforming ongoing events into memory narratives. Digitized memories turn the past into a permanent present through a swift and broader displacement from then-and-there to here-and-now.