Being digital citizens by claiming rights on the cyberspace. A ricoeurian reading

As embodied subjects of experience in the physical world, we inhabit cyberspace as «dividuals» composed of fragmented and dispersed data as a result of the operations performed by algorithms on (big) data (matching, profiling etc.). This alters the fundamental ethical and political anthropology of our times as the categories of identity are defined by algorithmic meaning. The focus of this article will be on the integration between the performative theory of digital citizenship proposed by Isin and Ruppert and the reflections on the subject of rights and responsibility proposed by Paul Ricoeur. Whilst the former theory aims at resignifying digital citizens as political subjects of cyberspace, in particular asserting that it is by claiming rights that we enact ourselves as digital citizens, in the latter the figure of an active and engaged legal subject emerges. I think that the two theoretical contributions, despite their different approaches, may interestingly complement each other. In particular I will argue that the implications of Isin and Ruppert’s theory of digital citizenship are well complemented by Ricoeur’s theory of the legal subject; reciprocally, the performative theory of (digital) citizenship proposed by the two authors does represent in its turn a pertinent reference for the theory of the Self constituted as a responsible subject of rights proposed by Ricoeur in the context of a datafied society.