Is there anybody out there? – Social Media as a new social fetish

It is often claimed that Social Media are changing the subject of social interaction, empowering people and facilitating new and interactive possibilities. The present paper, an empirically based theoretical reflection on the participative subject, follows Lacan’s and Zizek’s philosophical and psychoanalytical thinking by questioning the assumed interactive connotation of user profiles, attitudes and behavior through the philosophical and psychoanalytical concept of ‘interpassivity’. It describes how Social Media become a new social fetish for many of the so-called ‘produsers’, reducing the allegedly social interactions into reified and objectified relationships, ‘decentering ’ the subject from within