The Appearance of Authority in Health and Wellbeing Media: Analysing Digital Guru Media through Lacan’s 'Big Other'

This chapter considers the proliferation of digital media technologies, which, on the one hand, proposes the dissolution of the subject while, on the other, and provides new opportunities for discovering, ‘sharing’ and/or improving one's ‘inner-Self’. The decline in our ‘symbolic efficiency’ is one given credence by a postmodern aesthetic that seeks to challenge and subvert normative assertions through an aversion to ‘grand narratives’ and forms of ideological authority. Certainly, the history of representation has always been one based upon selection, composition and editing; yet, what our social media prescribes is an open disavowal of these mechanisms, which both structure and frame our online interactions. Today, it can be argued that such minimal consistency is achieved, in part, through our relationship with digital/social media platforms, which render some form of the Self visible. It would seem that our digital media environments offer both promise and peril.