CONTRIBUTI / 11 / di Lorenzo De Stefano
The aim of the essay is to examine the mechanism that rules the World Wide Web and the new frontier of communication, the Online Social Network, in reference to the repercussion that this new media have on the politic and social sphere. The so called Big Data Revolution has deeply changed the propaganda in the post-democratic era and the way to shape the public opinion via the control and the profiling of emotions. I will start from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, denounced by the Guardian and Channel 4, in order to underline the dynamics that rule the Internet concerning the risk of a new digital totalitarianism. I will discuss the role of strategies such as gamification, profiling and psychological targeting in their biopolitical relevance as means of mass control. At the end of the paper, I compare this new form of digital totalitarianism to the previous totalitarian forms and I examine the new media’s role in shaping a new kind of mass-individuals via the control of passions.
