Practices of "self-caring": from symbolic to manipulative dimension of digital mass media

Abstract

The contemporary German philosopher W. Welsch points to the current processes of widespread aestheticization, "the sensibility of well-being" and the advertising character of lifestyle, enhanced by the effects of mass media and social networks. Today, mass media do not simply offer and exchange attractive lifestyles; they shape the practices of "the care of the self" into practices of coercion. Which, in essence, is a model of communication simulation and a mechanism of manipulative technologies. The promise of security, the totality of self-preservation, and the substitution of life with "summer freshness," which Th. Adorno noted in the twentieth century in his discussion of the jargon of authenticity, are exploited by the mass media in the twenty-first century and embodied in the production and lifestyle that have become decisive and legitimate. The contemporary subject is constituted on the basis of a certain number of rules, styles and conventions found in the digital medial space. It is necessary to define contemporary practices of "the care of the self" in order to understand the imputed and circulating stable forms of relations in contemporary culture. An attempt is made to answer the following questions: How is the subject in practices of "the care of the self" constituted by the effects of digital mass media? What are the relations that exist between the subject being formed and the forms of mass-media power relations?