Selfie and Interpellation - A Preliminary Study of the Role of Ideology in the Social Construction of Reality, Self and Society in the Digital Age

Abstract

: In this essay, I present a preliminary analysis of selfying that combines the social construction of the self with the critical approach to scientific knowledge. Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ and the works of Goffman and Barthes offer useful conceptual tools for a radical engagement with the social significance of selfying. This preliminary analysis mainly concludes that selfying is a distinctive and ambivalent form of ‘interpellation from below’, addressing but also reproducing the challenges pertaining to the construction of the self in the symbolic universe of the neoliberal agenda . On semantic grounds, the most significant aspect of this process is that the ‘signifier’ creates its ‘signified’, and the social construction of the self is framed within the confines of capitalist ideology and its symbolic forms of expression of the relationship between reality, the individual and society. The relevance of this approach is at least twofold. On theoretical grounds, I am trying to combine Kenneth J. Gergen’s approach to the social construction of the self and Jürgen Habermas critique of the ideology of science with Barthes’ insights on the problems of meaning, Goffman’s understandings of the ‘problems of the real’, and Althusser’s notion of interpellation. On practical grounds, the ambition is to increase awareness and knowledge of the dilemmas associated with the presentation of the self in the digital age, and to inspire more emancipative responses to these dilemmas: responses more independent of and possibly challenging the ideological project of neoliberalism.