ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some preliminary theoretical propositions on the existential condition of being tagged in photographs uploaded to social media platforms. It argues that social tagging is a contemporary intensification of long-standing procedures for maintaining our being in the world: the naming of persons and the figural incarnation of bodies. It is a contemporary intensification of these human practices which instantiate, replicate and disseminate the embodied subject discursively and visually. However, tagging is also an operative and generative procedure: when you tag someone, your contacts and theirs are notified, and the tagged photograph is frequently replicated in contacts’ various feeds. Tagging is therefore a computationally-realized magical incantation, where uttering the name instantly multiplies body-images of the named. By alerting our contacts about our being tagged, tagging becomes a recurrent rite of naming and incarnation that invites confirmation and assent (likes, comments). It is thus a way of performing phatic sociability through the ‘selving’ of others – by virtue of their named body-images – usually without their prior permission. Finally, tagging puts visual ‘flesh’ onto the informational and computational –bones’ underpinning the network apparatus. It materializes and animates the social network platform as a connective social body that is populated through the continual proliferation, identification and confirmation of the named body-images of its constituent members. It thus produces a powerful poetic-ideological effect: the palpability of the apparatus as a sensuously inhabited world.
