The zoom-in culture of digitally-mediated identity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This conceptual article examines how digital ‘user-structures’ (social media user-formats and smart phone camera technologies with editing apps and filters), act as ‘structuring mechanisms’ shaping apperception, ‘forming’ how the subject approaches the spatio-temporalities of their identities through a digitally enabled ‘micrological attitude’. The concept of the ‘micrological attitude’ developed here seeks to capture a modality of contemporary subjectivity characterised by the disposition of ‘zooming in’ with a focus on the minutoise in digitally-mediated self-presentation and self-appropriation. In this ‘attitude’, so this article argues, the subject takes up a relation to their own embedded and embodied identity. Through a spatio-temporal ‘micrological attitude, the article discusses the idea that the digitally- mediated subject is becoming a ‘phenomenologist of their own identity’.