Anxiety in digital consumer culture: a psychoanalytic reflection on the emergence of a reactive subjectivity

Anxiety is widely understood to be a harmful consequence of engagement with digital technologies such as social media. Although digital life is studied by cultural consumer researchers, its psychic effects are not well explored. We focus on anxiety as a psychosocial effect of digital consumer culture by elaborating on Teresa Brennan’s theorisation of the connection between technological development, subject formations, and space–time relations. We propose four psychosocial trends that propel anxiety, illustrated by composite narratives: objectification, immediacy, disembodiment, and estrangement. Our narratives emphasise a spatio-temporal shift in how the subject relates to itself and others, conditioning the emergence of a reactive subjectivity driven by self-examination and modification rather than relationality. This offers an understanding of how digital technologies shape subject formations to be anxious, thereby attending to capital interests invested in propelling a reactive state of subjectivity at the expense of the spontaneous, relational experience of being human.