Communicative practices of subjectivity in social media from the perspective of neoliberalism

The paper describes the communicative practices of subjectivity in social media through the prism of the concept of classical liberalism (neoliberalism). The symbolic behavior of users is considered in two aspects: first, as a mechanism of self-identification, which goes back to the technologies of the so-called Foucault’s governmentality; and second, as discursive practices in Internet communities, which are reduced to disciplinary “power-knowledge” procedures. The author concludes that the mechanism of governmentality is of interactive cyclic nature, i.e. the user constructs “self”, and subjectivity becomes autoreflexive. In other words, the practices of domination and freedom overlap and are meaningfully identical. The phenomenon of Internet communities as universal discursive practices does not allow one to reach a consensus and is a permanent social differentiation fraught with the effect of depoliticization.