In memoriam/ Hommage

Within the media ecosystem of networks, platforms, and connected devices, technology ceases to be a merely rational instrument and becomes instead an operator of collective enchantment. Digital interactions—memes, emojis, avatars, visual streams, and participatory practices—thus function as the rituals of an emotional sociality grounded less in public opinion than in what may be called public emotion. From a sociological perspective attentive to the symbolic and affective dimensions of digital culture, the article shows how technological infrastructures foster the formation of connective pacts in which passions, imaginaries, and techno-social fetishes replace the rational mediations characteristic of modernity. Drawing on examples from the ordinary uses of platforms and participatory cultures, it highlights the emergence of a technomagical realism in which magical thinking and algorithmic calculation intertwine, redefining the conditions of being-together. In this context, the digital condition appears both as a space for the re-enchantment of the social world and as a symptom of the crisis of the autonomous subject and of the rationalist paradigm inherited from the Enlightenment.