The culture of make belief : towards understanding postdigital identity, platformization and techno nationalism through infinite detail

Abstract

This dissertation is a story about our culture of make belief. Due to advent of platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, Google and Amazon, new imagined communities are being born, which are techno-nationalist in nature. Platforms are also reconfiguring our identities and projecting cybernetic governance upon us by shifting sovereignty from the land towards the cloud. The primary focus of this research is the deconstruction of these ideas of contemporary nationalism, Postdigital identity, and the platformization of our daily lives, by focusing first on ‘what’ they actually mean,‘how’ they operate, and ‘why’ we should care about them in the first place, by situating theoretical texts alongside the novel Infinite Detail. The story ends on the note of both practical and philosophical advice, acknowledges limitations and highlights the scope for future research.