Re-enacting painful and sensitive memories on social platforms through fictional profiles

The possibility of passing for someone else did not emerge with social media. However, the fact that, as the saying goes, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” has made building fictitious identities much easier. In this paper, we will explore the hypothesis that beyond trivial experiments with pseudonyms, the option of experimenting with “versions of oneself” on social platforms has given rise to a new genre, that we term “fictional profiles.” We will consider the fictional profile as a symbiotic agent, pointer and witness to contemporary society. After a general introduction to the genre and a critical discussion of methodologies to identify its specificities, we will focus on two re-enactments of historical events and figures on Facebook and Instagram. We will discuss the problematic nature of these works in terms of valorization, preservation and archiving insofar as, on the one hand, they question the classical categories of the work, the author and the reader; and, on the other hand, they are fundamentally dependent on their publication platforms.