Modulação algorítmica e psicopolítica: juventude digital na era das plataformas

Abstract

This thesis investigates contemporary processes of subjectivation based on the experience of young Instagram users. It starts from the understanding that digital platforms do not operate merely as means of interaction, but as sociotechnical devices that govern practices, affects, desires, and forms of visibility, producing new ways of being and existing in the world. The expansion of digital social networks reveals modes of existence oriented by logics of prediction, performance, comparison, visibility, and social validation. The research is grounded in the articulation between theories of subjectivation and analyses of psychopolitical power, which understand subjectivation as a relational process, historically situated and traversed by regimes of modulation of subjectivities. Instagram is taken as the empirical field due to its centrality as a device for organizing contemporary social experience, whose architecture articulates massive data collection, predictive analysis, and the modulation of behaviors, affects, and desires. The empirical focus involves young people aged between 16 and 24, with different forms of relationship with the platform. The methodological approach is qualitative, based on the application of a questionnaire, in-depth interviews, and direct observation. The analysis shows that, even with different intensities of use, subjects remain crossed by dynamics of self-comparison, visibility, affection, and social validation, mediated by algorithmic architectures that operate directly and in a distributed manner beyond the digital interface. As an analytical result, four ideal types are constructed: the hyperperformative subject, oriented toward exposure and performance; the ambivalent subject, marked by oscillations between engagement and distancing; the captured subject, whose subjectivation is strongly crossed by mechanisms of personalization and algorithmic modulation; and the oblique subject, characterized by low engagement but still traversed by norms of digital culture. The findings indicate that continuous interaction with the digital environment acts as a vector of affective modulation, modulated desire, and reorganization of practices of the self, producing new forms of sociability (shallow sociability) and figures of errant circulation in the digital environment, such as the CyberWalkers. By understanding algorithmic modulation as a technique within a regime of psychopolitical digital modulation, articulated with the logic of performative selfgovernment and performative a-resistance, this thesis contributes to the sociological analysis of contemporary transformations of subjectivity in the context of the digitalization of everyday life and shows how the constitution of the self occurs under technical, affective, and symbolic architectures oriented by processes of prediction, algorithmic modulation, and modulation of affects, associated with regimes of visibility and the search for social validation.