A thousand and one suddenly broken screens

This book questions what is in common between the photographs taken by David Davis, a common Facebook user, and those of thousands of other users; how can the practice of accumulation and appropriation of images serve as strategies to reflect on the construction of the individual in the digital age? Based on Aby Warburg's concepts of engram and pathosformel, and José Luis Brea's e-image, we observe how social networks have diluted individual subjectivity in a kind of common pit of shared experience, of simulated intersubjectivity. In the end, we show how the transmission and circulation of photographs in social networks -such as Instagram and Facebook- has colonized subjectivity, through a promise of apparent originality, which in the end leads to a ghostly space, inhabited by appearances that, despite their effort to achieve difference, become distorted reflections, dynamic fractals.