Mythologies individuelles, mythologies numériques ?

Abstract

The concept of “individual mythology” is haunting the twentieth century: pushed forward by the capitalistic individualims, it means picturing ourselves, imagining our identity and performing it through the medias. It comes along with the idea of an individual writing everyday his own history, and its most common form was the personal photo album. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, in the age of the digital and social networks, is this notion still relevant to qualify contemporary representation of the self? And how? Is the individual mythology being replaced by the only “performance,” in Erving Goffman’s sense? This paper, which aims to embrace a large point of view, studies the survival of individual mythology on the main social networks. It focuses specifically on Facebook which inherits the most of this notion, as much as formally than ideologically.

Keywords

• Facebook
• individual mythologies
• social performance
• representation of the self
• public space
• stereotypes