Everyday digital practices and performances in the emergence of collective subjectivity
Date
2021
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
My dissertation offers a novel understanding of democratic subjectivity. It ultimately argues that the digitalization of everyday practices and the public sphere reveals the constitution of collective subjectivity. Rather than analyzing the actions and words of elites, I focus on everyday people. I argue there are mechanistic properties (e.g. openness) of the internet—social media in particular—that tend toward contention and disruption. In a digitalized society, the practices associated with everyday life are imbricated with those necessary for participation and communication on social media. It is through and around what I identify as sharing practices that individuals come together to form overlapping transboundary political communities that I call collective subjectivities. I conceptualize a particular instance of sharing information online as a performance indicating membership to an evolving group of like-minded individuals. Because of their members’ thin and overlapping allegiances, these kinds of groups exhibit the potential to coalesce into larger, more united and powerful transboundary political entities in salient historical moments. Rarely do they publicly present a positive political program; rather, because of the practices they used to find themselves together, they disrupt normal politics and move on.
Description
Keywords
Democracy, Political communication, Political theory, Social media, Social movements, Transnationalism