Fear and Loathing of the Online Self: A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures

Abstract

According to Shosana Zuboff, “the first modernity supressed the growth and expression of self in favour of collective solutions, but by the second modernity, the self is all we have.” In this book, we ask what the state of the arts of the self is in the digital age. Where is the online self after all our identities have been digitized, traced, and hacked? There is a broad consensus that the self is never one, taking on multiple shapes and sizes. At the same time, digital technologies seem ideal to pinpoint us to one essentialist identity. In our current, past-Trump-Brexit position our culture seems to constantly bounce back and forth between these two poles—with in between the image of the self. In the same sentence we praise its weight and depth of the online self, while complaining about its empty vanity side