Quelques enjeux psychiques du pouvoir pastoral appliqué aux technologies persuasives

Abstract

Context

The advent of persuasive technologies in our hyper modern society contributes to modifying the way individuals interact with social networks. This modification, which falls under the Idea of Pharmakon, bears implications as to how social link is produced/made. These technologies are also a marker of the rise of a civilisation based on technoscience and the market economy, thus annunciating changes in the possibilities of subjectivation.

Goal

In this article we are questioning the features and psychic repercussions of this specific relationship the contemporary subject builds with social network in which persuasive technologies are involved. This mainly relies on personalised content, proposed in an implicit manner.

Methodology

We collected information from testimonies, semi conducted research interviews and propose in the article to explore in depth one specific interview which, through the prism of psychoanalysis, allows multiple lines of thought. We rely on qualitative analyse of speech, in which transfert is expressed, along with unconscious processes and psychic symptoms related to this topic.

Results

We have established that some modalities of symptom manifestations may reveal subjectivities caught in a power device carried by the social network, which is saturated with persuasive technologies: the pastoral power.

Interpretation

One may reconsider the Idea of an exclusively psychopathological lecture of psychological pain in order to reveal unconscious means of defence of the subject against this power device on the social network.