You Have Been Tagged: Incanting Names and Incarnating Bodies on Social Media

• In Event: Digital Media and the Body

Abstract

With the rise of social network services as key mechanisms for storing and displaying photographic images, new techniques for identifying, classifying and circulating images have emerged. Tagging is perhaps the most prevalent of these techniques: while tagging systems allow participants to annotate web-based objects in general, platforms such as Facebook particularly encourage tagging as a means of identifying others in uploaded photographs.
Most research on tagging explores it as a ‘folksonomic’ categorization method, the social motivations of those who tag, tagging’s privacy implications and its contribution to face-recognition technologies. In contrast, this paper offers some preliminary theoretical propositions emerging from the condition of being tagged in a photo. It argues that social tagging is deeply indebted to long-standing procedures for establishing and 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 in social media doesn’t only connect names to bodies in images (over and over again). It is a semi-public operative and generative procedure: when you tag someone your contacts and their contacts are notified, and the tagged image is frequently replicated in these contacts' various feeds. Tagging is therefore a computationally realized magical incantation, where uttering the name instantly reproduces and circulates body-images of the named. By alerting our contacts to the fact of 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 itself as a connective social body that is populated through the continual proliferation, identification and confirmation of the named body-images of its own constituent members. Thus tagging produces a powerful aesthetic-ideological effect: the palpability of the apparatus as a sensuously inhabited world.

Author

• Paul Frosh, Hebrew U of Jerusalem