Genealogy of Digital Stigmatization: From the Great Confinement to the Algorithms of Exclusion in the Age of Social Media

The article updates the creative legacy of Michel Foucault, which is of particular importance in the digital age, in particular, for understanding the phenomenon of digital stigmatization. Particular attention is paid to the following concepts: “powerknowledge”, “discourse”, “disciplinary power and normalization”, “genealogy”. Stigmatization is a mechanism of power and control in modern societies. Foucault's genealogical method is a historical method that involves the search for nonlinear patterns in the development of power relations. It is not the truths that scientists can understand, but the special constructions of those “truths” that are used to exercise power. The following features in the manifestation of transformations of the process of exclusion of the subject were identified: denaturalization, a marker of power relations, continuity and ruptures, an emphasis on the body and the subject. The phenomenon of the “Great Confinement” and the features of the formation of the Other are characterized. The mechanisms of exclusion and isolation are defined, built on binary oppositions, the dichotomy of “friend or foe”, defining the problem of constructing identity, ideologies and manipulations. Social media and Internet comments are revealed as new spaces of discipline and stigmatization.