Social change in the perspective of biographical reflection

The modern world is interpreted and described in terms of an autobiographical society, in which the fundamental issues of human life are resolved in the process of an individual decision and being involved in a peculiar type of a dialog. This dialog is more and more often a dialog with oneself and an author’s vision of the world created in the confrontation with virtual reality. In this epoch context the biography is taken into account as a tool for perceiving, understanding and describing the change of the world and the human’s place in the world. Even though, the biography has functioned in social life forever, only now with the epoch of individualization, and then virtualization of life, its formative character has been noticed. Who is the subject of (auto)biography? Who is it aimed at as a message and testimony of life? How is it created? Why is it constructed? Who is it constructed by? And then the questions which are behind the autobiography in the theoretical sense – What is life? How do we discover it? What is the link between telling about life and living the life? How is the telling (living) about a life connected with culture and history? How does reading (interpreting) about life connect with telling about life and the truth about life? Social development phases coupled with transformations within biographical reflection have been distinguished: life in a traditional world – the culture of telling about life; the birth of individualism (the individualization of experience) – the culture of describing life; the discovery of identity – the culture of reading about life; life in the net and cyberspace – the culture of constructing life; the new communalism – the culture of seeking the meaning of life. Every stage of biographical reflection enables us to distinguish new forms of creating, understanding and using it in both the humanities and social life, but also in ordinary people’s life. The direction of changes sketched above was set conventionally – it is of a qualitative and continuous nature, yet it doesn’t mean that it’s common. Nowadays, all types of biography distinguished in the process of its development and becoming common, are at use