Social Networking and the Production of the Self

Abstract

There is a popular French website that could loosely be translated as “Life Sucks” (Vie de merde) where anybody can post humorous anecdotes about embarrassing events in their lives, from saying the wrong thing in front of in-laws to snoring on public transports and so on. One such anecdote published a while back, and which says something about the externalization of the self on social media platforms, read as follows: “Today, I’ve been single for such a long time that my Facebook ads are not about online dating anymore, but about adopting a dog.” I like to think of these instances of being told who one is and what one should do by a nonhuman software apparatus as emblematic of the rise of psychic media. By psychic media, I not only mean media that work directly on and with the human psyche, but also media that act like palm-reader psychics, that scrutinize patterns in order to predict and potentially orient actions. I have talked about this aspect of social media platforms already in the previous chapter and started explaining how social media as industries are about the mining and mobilization of the psyche within corporate networks.