The Psychopolitics of Social Media: A Brief Investigation
by Sebastian Quiroz
From the author:
So this essay was originally what I had submitted as my midterm for PHL325: Neoliberalism and Biopolitics with Prof. Steve DeCaroli, with some slight edits and additional information included in this final version for the sake of added clarity. This class was primarily an exploration of the work of the French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault, in particular his formulations regarding the phenomena of disciplinary power, biopower, and biopolitics, and how he saw biopower and biopolitics shift in interesting ways beginning in the 1970s with the burgeoning paradigm of neoliberalism. Although now largely taken for granted, the novelty of neoliberalism for Foucault and others at the time meant that endeavors to trace out its possible developments in the realms of economics, politics, culture, society, and so on, proved to be a worthwhile endeavor, at least to the extent that it provided some interesting musings and theorizations.
Outside of the class around this time, I had recently begun coming into contact with the work of two different authors. The first author was Byung-Chul Han, a contemporary South Korean-German philosopher and theorist. Of concern for this essay is his text Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, wherein which he expands on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in ways that I thought were really interesting and relevant to our current moment in various ways. In particular, I found a lot of what Han was theorizing within Psychopolitics regarding the intersection of power, social interaction, and the realm of the digital to be worth exploring in more detail and with some specific examples that could potentially exemplify the theory well. To that latter end, the second author comes in; the Irish writer and journalist Roisin Kiberd, whose book The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet I considered to be a singularly captivating read, and one which I found to be ripe with particular examples of phenomena that could be interpolated through Han’s theories rather nicely. Though I only touch on the material in Kiberd’s text somewhat briefly, I would nonetheless consider her writing to be a jumping-off point of sorts for me to look into other phenomena within social media that could likewise be related to Han’s formulations. To that end, this essay closes with a brief exploration of the infamous Twitter shitposter dril and the potentially useful example that they set when navigating the online spaces of social media.
This is the first major essay that I had ever written for one of Prof. DeCaroli’s classes, and I am ultimately pretty satisfied with the end result. Consider this to be a synthesis of sorts of the dual interests that I have in both philosophy/critical theory and internet culture, and enjoy the read 🙂
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