Digital Genealogy: Aura, Liquidity, and Burnout in Online Identity

This article develops the concept of digital genealogy as a critical lens for understanding contemporary subjectivity in environments structured by platforms and algorithms. Building on Benjamin’s aura, Bauman’s liquidity, and Han’s burnout, the analysis traces how digital selfhood is produced through practices of performative presence, memory curation, and visibility. Empirical studies of selfies, ephemeral stories, and Bitmojis illustrate how authenticity is negotiated through fragments that are at once intimate and replicable, while van Dijck’s work shows how digital memory shifts from archiving the past to continuously fabricating the self. The paradox that emerges—identities are performed as fleeting yet archived permanently by infrastructures—reveals the coexistence of ephemerality and machinic inscription. Read through Benjamin’s concept of aura, reinterpreted by contemporary authors such as Mirzoeff, Groys, and Hansen, this transformation situates singularity not only in artworks but in the self, which must be ceaselessly enacted and recomposed in algorithmic environments. The framework also connects to critiques of precarity and exploitation: Marcuse, Fuchs, and Varoufakis highlight how self-expression doubles as unpaid digital labor within platform capitalism. Digital genealogy thus provides both a theoretical and normative contribution: it discloses the paradox of visibility and exhaustion as the price of belonging, and it points toward future empirical research—such as ethnographies of adolescents and creators—that can test how individuals negotiate the tension between platform imperatives and the desire for rooted self-narratives.