Stalking Oneself
The Fantasmatic Intersubjectivity of Google
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21729043 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alois Sieben (0009-0001-6713-1721, Simon Fraser University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-29 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | CLCWeb Comparative Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1481-4374 • E-ISSN: 1481-4374 |
| Publisher | Purdue University (bepress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.7771/1481-4374.4092 |
| OpenAlex | W4318475394 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
This essay reads fictional and non-fictional accounts of digital stalking as signals of larger changes in intersubjectivity itself caused by Google. Most social media platforms trap users in imaginary relations, in which the other is encountered as a complete profile, but Google allows the searcher to locate an absence in the other in the form of a missing search result. As will be shown in an analysis of two contemporary novels whose first-person narrations center around Google-stalking, Caroline Kepnes’s You (2014) and Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy (2017), Google’s mode of intersubjectivity amounts to an endless tunnel with no light at its end, whose exploration only feeds the profits of digital capitalism. Through a comparison of real-life stalking and digital stalking, historical shifts in the subject’s relation to the Other are captured
Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Intersubjectivity · Media studies · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Stalking · Sympathy · The Imaginary · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Sharing Economy and Platforms · Social Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
|---|