Imagined Communities 2.0

A solicited response for a forum on Matthew Flisfeder’s Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, organized by Yahya Madra, this brief essay considers the book’s thesis that social media functions as a new symbolic order for digital society, one that both ideologically interpellates individuals and provides a metaphor for social totality that might galvanize social transformation. The essay concludes that this thesis significantly contributes to media studies but neglects the psychoanalytic account of digital infrastructures as a waning of the symbolic and an elevating of the imaginary. It therefore underestimates some political complexities of digital culture.