DOI: 10.4324/9781003372578-16 12 Images in the Age of Social Media Capitalism, Consumerism, and Liberalism Fabio Tononi Introduction: On Contemporary “Iconomania” To explore the culture of images in present-day society, it is necessary to focus not only on works of art but also on vernacular images. 1 In the age of social media, everyone has the potential to be an image-maker due to the mass diffusion of digital devices designed to take as many pictures as one pleases without any cost. The occasions may be various: birthday parties, family ceremonies, evenings with friends, or simply to capture the mood of the moment. This approach to studying visual culture – that is, by considering the full range of images in circulation and not only an arbitrary selection of them – has a long tradition. For example, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin (2003, 255) investigated the effects of the reproducibility of artworks on the essence of images, distinguishing between “uniqueness and permanence” and “transitoriness and repeatability.” John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (2008) called into question the traditional hierarchy of the arts by considering a painting or sculpture equivalent to a photo- graph or an advertisement. In a series of texts, W.J.T. Mitchell (2015, 2011, 2005, 1986) tackled the essence of images in different domains, such as art, science, journalism, and the media. And in The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989), David Freedberg rejected the way art historians had conceived the hierarchy of images, investigating the power exercised by images on viewers regardless of their artistic value. Given the history of image-making, human life seems to be dominated by images (Sontag 2008). Images are among the things that distinguish us as social beings. This prominence of images has become increasingly evi- dent in recent decades. In his 1956 On Promethean Shame, Günther Anders (2016, 56) created the term “iconomania” to refer to “the current addiction to images.” Despite the date of its coinage, there is no better name for present- day worldwide image sharing on social media like Facebook (since 2004), Instagram (since 2010), and TikTok (since 2016) – not to mention television, (electronic) billboards, and newspapers. As Anders (2016, 56) stated: “It is certainly indisputable that this addiction to images is a first in the history of