Digital regimes of identity management : from the exercise of privacy to modulation of the self
Résumé
Digital technology has a tendency towards exhaustiveness of memory due to the ease of recording and, to a certain extent, the lowering of storage costs. This chapter examines the transformations induced by digital technologies in the process of identity building, moving through different existential territories. It compares three main cases: the state, "services", and social relations. The chapter shows that the question of identity as it most matters to individuals themselves is probably even more directly addressed. It looks into the regime of modulation, where the possible transformative power would not come from a front‐on confrontation with power, but from a subtle diversion of its logic. In the exercise of the Quantified Self, modulation passes precisely through metrics of self that rely on digital syntax and lead to the establishment of an imminent and individualized "norm" that loses its normative character in favor of the modulation of the individual and its machinic enslavement.