Thirty-Seven Retweets

Despite its many immaterial qualities, the digital world has acquired a certain symbolical authority. In recording and registering all our acts it enacts formal control over what we do. But what is likely to disturb us most is not a lack of control over our digital lives, but how we are somehow both passive and instrumental in its symbolic power over us. In this chapter I will argue how the tension resonating between the materiality of the physical and the digital world stems from a difficulty in reconciling how subjectivity emerges from the distance both have from one another. Inevitably, as the digital domain leeks further into our physical worlds what we experience is a short-circuiting of subjectivity in which fantasy and reality collide with one another.

Keywords: differentiating day-to-day lived reality ; fantasy and reality ; Hegel ; immaterial qualities ; Lacan ; lived reality re-defined by immaterial experiences of the digital world ; subjectivity ; symbolic power ; the digital world ; the digital world seeping into the experience of lived reality ; the material particularities of the personal ; Twitter ; uncontaminated digital fantasmatic real