La gestione digitale del sé : Immagini e prestazioni identitarie sui social network

The article considers the images and performances of the face in social net- works from the perspective of a radical hypothesis: images in social networks are al- ways identity-related images for, while adopting strategies of self-management at the physical level, they express a constitutive tension between permanence and transfor- mation with respect to both ongoing social debates and the behaviour of algorithms. This hypothesis is supported by a reinterpretation of Paul Ricœur’s theory of identity centred on the narratives realized through visual languages, and on the rhetorical and mediatic tensions that govern the functioning of social networks. The cases of a num- ber of influencers are focused on to analyse the role played by the face: a common narrative structure is identified and defined as a ‘dramaturgy of the face’, adopted by influencers in order to mediate between the identity expressed by experiential images (selfies, first-person shots, live videos) and the behavioural identity modelled by algo- rithms (recommendations on Facebook, Instagram, Netflix and Tinder). The first part of the paper focuses on the action of influencers in order to show the mediatic and semiotic dynamics underlying social media, as well as the way in which the collec- tive construction of values (quantitative, monetary, reputational) is managed around identities. The second part takes into account the role of the face in identity-related performances realized through images, such as reaction videos and ‘face reveals’.