Guy Debord proffered that the spectacle in late capitalism is a "social relationship between people that is mediated by images" (1994). In the context of reconfigured political, economic and social structures it comes as no surprise that our social identity has also undergone significant evolution to meet the new demands, uncertainties and opportunities as they have manifested over the new contiguous borders of online social media and mobile technologies. Within digital social communities we see the evolution to a normalized and celebrated surface screen representation of self, enabled by the best ‘apps’ for editing the Self. This paper/presentation will survey the emergent languages of social media/digital culture (The New Aesthetic/machine vision, Selfies, Snapchat’s augmented reality lens and filters etc.) and will proceed to explore the new power dynamics and impact of becoming a more spectral yet art directed or ‘illustrated’ self.

Foucault’s notion of Panoptic Diffusion “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power“ (1977) will be used to explore the non-passive technological facilitation and social practice of self-objectification. The paper/presentation will proceed to document particular semiotics of online digital culture and its lexical representation – wherein specific gestures/body language or filters stand in for certain ideas and the practice of more conditional specific representation (Carroll, 2012) where some particular background knowledge is needed to understand it as a representation arguing that both modes of communication are highly utilized in contemporary Illustrative methods.

The paper/presentation will conclude by proposing that the contemporary social appetite for not only augmenting but also significantly editing their photographic or ‘screen grabbed’ images combined with the emergent conditional specific language(s) within online culture arguably is making Illustrators of us all, in which circumstance the one must carefully consider the consequences of continued consumption of imitative images (Rothman & Vestige 2015).