Victor Gabriel García Castañeda
(Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Abstract:
The hyper-mediatic nature of the post-digital era has created new pathological modalities on the way in which Internet users present themselves on social media. It is not uncommon to hear nowadays about narcissism (infatuation with the self-image), attention deficit disorder (derived from the oversaturation of information), sociopathy (fostered in online communities that hold radical ideologies), depression and anxiety (caused by the pressure of seeking social recognition) or other affective and behavioral disorders in relation to the compulsive use of digital technologies. In this space I will argue that these disorders are presented within the framework of cognitive, affective and aesthetic capitalism that demands users –specially the most active and the so-called “influencers”– to maintain a systematic presence on social media, to represent themselves with stylized bodies, over perfectly designed scenarios and maintaining a transmedia projection of their self in episodic forms by means of different textual and audiovisual supports. On the other hand, it is common for content creators to enter “burnout” phases of creative or physical exhaustion, as is the case of streamers who spend hours recording on their computers daily, often without leaving their homes for weeks, in addition to being pressured to always show a positive and entertaining facet of their lives for their followers. Exploring the effects of late capitalism exploitation of the affective dynamics of social media is important to understand the social constructions of online and offline identities and the political dimension of the self.
Victor Gabriel García Castañeda is a Philosophy PhD student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona doing research on the aesthetics of the post-internet subject. He holds a Masters on Sociology from the Iberoamerican University of Mexico City and a bachelor’s in Philosophy and Social Sciences from ITESO (Guadalajara, Mexico). His research interests include: digital cultures, aesthetic and cognitive capitalism, online identity constructions, the attention economy and the informational person and body. He has previously worked as a research assistant, a political communications consultant and an editor for a nation-wide newspaper in Mexico. He also writes for different magazines about the Internet, popular culture and music.