Das digitalisierte Subjekt. Grenzbereiche zwischen Fiktion und Alltagswirklichkeit

The history of the modern subject is an eventful history. Once seen as an autonomous entity, it has since been declared dead. The theory of the subject oscillates between epistemology and social theory. The article questions the interplay between the subject and its environment: Is the subject capable of shaping itself or is it shaped by its environment?

Apps and activity trackers significantly changed the field of bio-surveillance. Their feedback technologies facilitate not only issues related to healthy lifestyles, but also multiply social control. At the interface of digital media systems and information and communication technologies, they are a key factor in the ›datalization‹ of our bodies. This article is concerned with the logic of digital activity and health monitoring, assessing its status in the context of practices of self-guidance in process-oriented negotiation processes.

Media satire, like literary satire, subverts the familiar. Media satire and satirical authors question the seemingly familiar by distorting media dispositions and practices by the means of parasitic intervention. The paper discusses forms of this new media phenomenon using the French newsportal Le Gorafi as an example, and explores how these practices can be used to establish alternative or even counter-discursive practices of the self.

One artistic strategy by director and artist Christoph Schlingensief was the (presumed) disclosure of the private. The contribution examines different forms of subjectivation in different kind of media, in his ›Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung‹ and his Schlingenblog. It seems that the negotiation of the subject takes place in a mode of openness and auto-fiction on one hand, and on the mode of visibility and publicity on the other. 

The paper investigates how subjects are discursively constituted in blogs and e-books of Tunisian Cyberactivists. The political blog as a possibility of direct reporting from a war zone becomes a medium of self-expression which additionally refers to other media formats (e-books, Facebook, printed publications) to constitute itself. The blog can therefore be seen as a media practice devoted to the expression and constitution of a subjective self-representation along the lines of the technique de soi in a political context. Furthermore, the blog also serves as a way of documenting, publishing and processing the experiences of the revolution.

The paper explores metaphors of (digitalized) subjects in visual art and literature. The 'audio walks' by artist Janet Cardiff  – as well as prose texts by writer Paul Nizon – are concerned with walking or marching subjects. The use of body and technology or an auto-fictional narrative draws attention to subjects that do not relate to any tangible or visible counterparts. They cannot be described as autonomous or stable, but moving.