O fascínio da imagem: o olhar e as redes sociais

Abstract

The present dissertation intends to explore the dimension of the fascination of the image in social media and propose a questioning about the look and performance of the self on stage, considering social media in a context marked by neoliberalism. In this bias, one of the questions posed concerns the inquiry about what the social media summons in the subject? Thus, the social media Instagram appears as a stage for this research as emblematic of a business model that fosters the Capitalist Discourse and as a contemporary record of the image, its flow and exposure imperative, which transforms it into a strategic device. This algorithmic platform is configured as a “place to look” at the phenomenon of self-images and the performativity of the self, with capitalism at its service and also as a backdrop. First, it seeks to contextualize the theme of the drive and the look, as well as illustrating it from fragments of Freud's cases about the fascination involved in this. It then elaborates on the themes of the body and the imaginary dimension in the constitution of the self to, only then, advance in the discussion on the functioning of digital platforms and their relationship with algorithmic logic, which seeks to specify what would be the consumer's desire, in an operation that always leaves a remainder. It is also intended to examine how capitalism makes use of drive components for marketing purposes. Finally, understanding visibility as structural and structuring, the expansion of the technological and media scope is examined, whose brand of the imperative of visibility is increasingly expanded and explored. The fascination evidenced by the avid expenditure of attention in front of smartphone screens and the posts that unfold in the imagery flow of digital platforms were dismembered and, from this, impasses were problematized in order to consider the Lacanian registers: with the imaginary, interrogating if about the self and the image; with the real, the drive and scope of the look; and, finally, with the symbolic, the mathematization involved in the algorithmization of platforms.