Fostering critical identities through social media archival images
The aim of IMACTIS is to stimulate European citizens into using social network images in a way as to manage their identities in a critical manner. Digital media have profoundly changed the meaning of identity through two different shifts pertaining to social interaction. On the one hand, experience-based communication such as the acts of liking, following, and sharing, together with the diffusion of representations such as selfies, point of view shots, and live videos, have led to the dissemination of instinctive forms of identity expression. On the other hand, the profiling of people’s social and political circles (Facebook), entertainment tastes (Netflix), service or product needs (Amazon and AdSense), and even of their sexual partners (Grindr and Tinder), has led to the delegation of behavioural identity management to algorithms. The main hypothesis of IMACTIS is that in order to link experiential representations with algorithmic management in the current communication environment, a reflexive and conscious narrative identity based on one’s own visual archives is required.  By approaching images as an everyday language, I will develop two axes of research built on a semio-rhetorical perspective: 1) I will study, by means of big data computer science methods, the heterogeneous and complex European visual cultures to be found on social media: the ethnic and physical variety of people and places, and the most used configurations and themes. 2) I will build another, more complex set of visual corpora, that of found footage videos belonging to the fiction, information, and ludic macro-genres. These corpora will serve as an experimental field: the narration strategies built upon the reuse of visual archives will be adapted to identity narrations on social networks. The resulting repertory of rhetorical strategies will aim to exploit the positive diversity embedded in European Union identity, as stated in the official motto “United in Diversity.”