Self Otherness in a virtual mirror

The stage of the mirror, introduced by Jacques Lacan in 1936 during a congress in Marienbad, defines the appearance of an awareness of the self, not through the senses, but through the image of one's own reflection. Indeed, the stage of the mirror intervenes during the first months of life, and allows the child to become aware of his existence by detaching it from the otherness that then forms a whole, of which he does not form part, but to which he opposes. It is thus an awareness of his self, of his body, and of the image he reflects. 

By interpreting, we can therefore say that the individual becomes aware that his reflection is a potential otherness for the other, but that it is not one for him. The emergence of social networks, however, contradicts the previous statement. Indeed, through the control of an identity entity, it is possible to fake its image, by controlling it, by staging a fictional character. Roland Barthes already explained this in the Chambre Claire in 1979, but using the bias of the photographic medium: "I live in the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image, my image, is going to be born: am I going to be given birth to an unfriendly individual or a good guy? Roland Barthes points here to the anguish about the control he does not have over his own image. There is thus inevitably an otherness in the image of the self, but social networks transform Barthes' observation, in the sense that social networks give the individual a possibility of total control over the image emitted. 

First of all by multiplying the possibility of creating a self-image. It is therefore more difficult to meet a self from the past. There is thus a frenetic compression of time and it is impossible to digest a self-image, which we already have ten new ways of being, almost ten new people in front of us. Like an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, and this is called cancer. The cells are not sick individually. And this often triggers a vicious circle, to take another picture, another self-image, another staging to show something extraordinary. But nothing can be extraordinary when it's so expansive.

Salomé Lacoeuilhe