Issue 2. From Comrades to Classmates: Social Networks on the Russian Internet
Lidia Mikheeva
Lidia Mikheeva (née Bayeshko) is an M.A. student of the Cultural and Visual Studies Programme at European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania. She has also studied sociology at the Belarus State University in Minsk. Her research fields cover sociology of religion, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and cultural studies. She is the co-author of The Encyclopaedia of Symbols (2007) and The Book of Sacral Knowledge (2008). Her work on international terrorism, fundamentalism, traditional religiosity, and religious relativism in the post-Soviet societies has been published in Russia and Ukraine.
2.3 Psychoanalytical Aspects of Self-Representation in Blogs
This article offers an outline of possible studies of blogs using the structural psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. This paradigm reveals a new perspective on the phenomenon of virtual personality. Sharing Lacanian theory of division of the so called “human personality” into three parts: Je (I), Moi (Ego), and Sujet (Subject), I see blogs as a specific cultural instrument of intensifying the Ego (but not the Subject), and I describe the basic methods by which the blog affects the revaluation of Ego. I argue that this process is simultaneously a symptom of a wide range of general social factors, such as the development of commodity fetishism and implementation of the logics of the postmodern type of capitalistic system into virtual space, as well as the transformations of personality in contemporary individuals.
Language of contribution: Russian