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Social media not only enable the exchange of images: they shape habits. Faced with the immense and seemingly chaotic visual production that proliferates across digital media, Mateo Belgrano asks why thousands of users take the same photographs of the same sunset, reproduce the same poses, and duplicate the same content. Drawing on the contributions of Bildwissenschaft and hermeneutics, he proposes the concept of “iconic habit” to explain how networked images mold the way we think, desire, and behave. Often considered poor and weak, these images - reproduced countless times - are often more powerful than the great masterpieces.
- Proposes an original concept for analyzing the agency of networked images: the iconic habit
- The first book-length study to bring Bildwissenschaft into dialogue with media and platform studies in order to analyze images on social media
- Combines philosophical argument with a close analysis of specific images native to social media
Mateo Belgrano is a philosopher working at the intersection of aesthetics, image theory and political philosophy. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the FernUniversität Hagen (Germany). He currently works as an assistant professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. He is an associate member of the Cluster of Excellence, “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” at Humboldt University Berlin. He has had several research stays in Germany and Italy thanks to various fellowships. He has published the books Resistir la cicuta. La “utilidad” de la filosofía en el siglo XXI (SB, 2025), El oasis del arte en la filosofía de Martin Heidegger (SB, 2023), El gesto criptográfico (Miño Dávila, 2022), as well as numerous articles on the philosophy of the image and various aesthetic issues in academic journals.