From Scrolling Through to Working Through Adolescence, Algorithms and the Search for Coherence

Digital technologies have become constitutive of adolescent development, shaping the conditions under which identity and self-experience unfold. Within this altered landscape, some young people increasingly turn to online self-diagnosis and health-tracking practices as ways of stabilizing a fragile sense of self, each datum an echo that promises self-knowledge but arrives refracted through algorithmic glass. This paper conceptualizes three interrelated dynamics that characterize adolescent engagement with these digital practices, which extend psychoanalytic concepts to accommodate the specific textures of technologically mediated experience. First, digital armouring refers to a process of defensive digital identity crystallization, whereby repetitive, emotionally charged diagnostic labels and self-tracking practices fosters premature fixation on named identities, foreclosing exploration of unconscious meaning and substituting for psychoanalytic working through. Second, algorithmically mediated projective identification describes how algorithms function as conduits for collective anxieties and symptom narratives, projected into digital environments and re-introjected by adolescents as self-definitions, transforming internal conflict into algorithmically reinforced identity claims. Third, the digital superego designates the internalization of algorithmic imperatives of optimization and visibility, which operates as a persecutory agency demanding constant self-surveillance and performance. Drawing on clinical material, I argue that adolescents’ reliance on digital self-diagnosis and health tracking exemplifies a fragile psychotechnical becoming, exposing how recognition and selfhood are now negotiated through machinic mirrors that both promise control and threaten to erode the essential work of representation.