This is the first instalment in a three-part series.
Part 2. I tweet, therefore I become
Part 3. The call of the crowd
——————————————-
You start the day bleary-eyed and anxious. You stayed up late last night working on a post for your blog, gathering facts and memes from about the web and weaving them into an incisive whole. Has it produced a spike in the stats? You sign in on your iPhone as you brew the coffee. But it’s too early to slip into the professional headspace – you decide that you don’t want to know. Someone has messaged you on Facebook, so you check that instead. Japanese manga mashup! Killer breaks off the cost of Lombok. Lady Gaga is a man and we have photoshopped evidence to prove it! A friend will appreciate that one, so you share it with her directly. Perhaps not something that you’d want to share widely. Two new contact requests on LinkedIn. Your profile needs updating. Should you include details about the design work you completed for the local event the week before? You are not sure. You are building your profile as a graphic artist and looking for quality clients. Perhaps this is a part of your person that you will let incubate for a while longer.
You jump on HootSuite and start sharing targeted content: Facebook for friends, tweets for professional contacts. The day has barely started and already you are split into half a dozen pieces.
How did we ever get by without social media? In under a decade, free online services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have utterly transformed how we work, play, and communicate. For hundreds of millions of people, sharing content across a range of social media services is a familiar part of life. Yet little is known about how social media is impacting us on a psychological level. A wealth of commentators are exploring how social media is refiguring forms of economic activity, reshaping our institutions, and transforming our social and organizational practices. We are still learning about how social media impacts on our sense of personal identity.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has a set of insights that can help clarify how social media affects us on a psychological level. Foucault died before the advent of the internet, yet his studies of social conditioning and identity formation in relation to power are applicable to life online. Seen from a Foucaultian perspective, social media is more than a vehicle for exchanging information. Social media is a vehicle for identity-formation. Social media involves ‘subjectivation’.
A Foucaultian perspective on social media targets the mechanism that makes it tick: sharing. Sharing is basic to social media. Sharing content is not just a neutral exchange of information, however. Mostly, when we share content on social media services, we do it transparently, visibly, that is in the presence of a crowd. The act of sharing is a performance, to an extent – it a performative act, an act that does something in the world, as J.L. Austin would say. This is important. The performative aspect of sharing shapes the logic and experience of the act itself.
There is a self-reflexive structure to sharing content on Facebook or Twitter. Just as actors on stage know that they are being watched by the audience and tailor their behaviour to find the best effect, effective use of social media implies selecting and framing content with a view to pleasing and/or impressing a certain crowd. We may not intend to do this but it is essential to doing it well. Unless we are sharing anonymously (and the radical end of internet culture, Anonymous, favours anonymity), all the content we share is tagged with an existential marker:
‘I sent this – it is part of my work. You shall know me by my works’.
Foucault understood how being made constantly visible impacts on us psychologically. Foucault was fascinated by Jeremy Bentham’s model of the ideal prison, the Panopticon, which has been incorporated in the architecture of prisons, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and urban spaces since Bentham designed it in the eighteenth century. In Benthem’s design, the Panopticon is comprised of a ring of cells surrounding a central guard tower. The prisoners in the cells are perpetually exposed to the gaze of the guards in the tower, yet since they cannot themselves see into the tower, they are never certain whether or not they are being watched.
Bentham’s Panopticon, Foucault argues, functions to make prisoners take responsibility for regulating their behaviour. Assuming that they care about the implications of bad behaviour, prisoners will act in the manner prescribed by the institution at all times on the chance that they are being watched. In time, as the sense of being watched gets under their skin, prisoners come to regulate their behaviour as if they were in a Panopticon all times, even after they have been released from the institution.
This, Foucault claims, is ‘the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201).
‘Conscious and permanent visibility’…’ Apparantly this is what Mark Zuckerberg thinks social media is all about. By making our actions and shares visible to a crowd, social media exposes us to a kind of virtual Panopticon. This is not just because our activities are monitored and recorded by the social media service for the purposes of producing market analysis or generating targeted advertising. For the most part, we can and do ignore this kind of data harvesting. The surveillance that directly affects us and impacts on our behaviour comes from the people with whom we share.
There are no guards and no prisoners in Facebook’s virtual Panopticon. We are both guards and prisoners, watching and implicitly judging one another as we share content.
In sharing online, we are playing to a crowd. On some level, we acknowledge this. The crowd consumes the content that we share and, if we are favoured, it passes it on. The crowd honours the identity that we create by sharing this content.
Sharing online is not solely a matter of self-affirmation and self-creation. For many people, the sharing impulse stems from a sincere desire to empower and inform their tribes and communities. We may be genuinely committed to getting the word out, or passing the word along, or just playing a part in keeping the conversation going by commenting on or liking what others have shared. The point is that whatever action we take, we make a personal statement in doing so: ‘I affirm this; I share it; I like it’. We speak to a crowd of our personal preferences, and we like nothing more than for the crowd to affirm those preferences in return.
No doubt this satisfies a deep psychological need for recognition. Whatever it is that drives it, it draws us back to share and share again.
Read part two in the series: I tweet, therefore I become
I don’t see it Tim.
We inhabit multiple platforms with different social groups and different norms enforced by those groups.
Isnt that like inhabiting multiple prisons, with multipke guards, who happen to be our peers.
Surely this all stretches the prison metaphor to breaking point.
And surely there is a differencw between visibility sought and visibility imposed. It isnt like the inmates in Bentham’s prison left wanting to be more visible. Visibility is a fact for them, whereas it is a weird desire if ours. A desire the panopticon doesnt seem to explain.
J
But the Panopticon model does explain our desire to share in public. This is why I think it is interesting.
It would be easy to stretch the prison metaphor too far: users of Facebook are not prisoners or guards in any meaningful sense. What I am saying is that the presence of the crowd has a psychological effect on users. Just as an individual in a Panopticon crafts or regulates him or herself in light of their visibility, Facebook users (and I guess this argument applies to Facebook more than many other social media systems – I should be explicit about this) play out their social identities as they post and share. I want to develop this idea in the next post and argue that we can and should be using this self-fashioning activity creatively (‘creative self-affirmation’).
The three posts are actually one long document. I think this first one will be easier to grok once I’ve published all three.
Reblogged this on Things I grab, motley collection .
Hi Tim,
Thank you for your post. I think that Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon represents an excellent way of thinking about social media and ‘subjectivation’ (I personally would call it ‘subjectification’ as this seems closer somehow to the idea of being made a subject (and making oneself a subject to something), but this is just a matter of taste!).
Justin is right in that the immediate prison metaphor does not seem appropriate. Nonetheless, there is much to be gained from thinking about the Panopticon and I think we need to think through how to build on the existing concept. The prison metaphor was ultimately just that, a metaphor for thinking about social relations, not simply a discussion about prison design and a complex of prisoner psychology. Foucault was thinking about power relations and the creation of the subject in a post-Enlightenment yet pre-mass media and certainly pre-internet age, but his ideas have a clear – at least for me – applicability to our contemporary new media age.
For Foucault, much of what you mention in relation to the subject relates to a diffuse form of power relations and systems of regulation of time, space and people. This is part of what he referred to as the ‘disciplinary society’, where discipline is understood not as simple projections of power or obligations onto subjects, but rather as a diffuse form of power in which every individual was implicated, albeit not in an equal way (the prison warden has more authority than a prisoner). A key component of this was the dynamic creation of power-knowledge (knowledge systems of authority that can classify, catalogue, assess and evaluate according to notions of truth or authenticity). A feature element of this was the ‘normalizing gaze’. This is an understanding of officially sanctioned knowledge or ‘truths’ about what is ‘normal’, ‘correct’, ‘desirable’, ‘appropriate’ or ‘deviant’ in people’s behaviour.
What is fascinating is the application of this notion of ‘normalisation’ to social media, and we come back to the idea of regulation and self-regulation within platforms which are essentially very individualised. While Facebook and Twitter possess particular designs which shape what users can and can’t do on their platforms, this power-knowledge dynamic has become arguably even less the preserve of those at the centre of control (i.e., the Panopticon’s central control tower).
And there is certainly no central form of power dictating want to do and what to be (or what not to do or be), other than obvious things like inappropriate images or abuse of other users being prohibited. People develop, adapt and update these ideas themselves constantly, depending on their own personal, individual relations and interactions within others online. Here the regulation of self is even more stark than in the prison metaphor: a social media user aims to project a particular image of her- or himself based on an understanding of what is appropriate, ‘cool’ or impressive (in simple terms, what is normal). This is not to say that this is ‘inauthentic’ or that they should automatically be criticised for ‘not being yourself’; it is more that this dynamic forms a key element of online behaviour.
This does not happen in any fixed way or as a means to a particular end, but rather as a process. This form of online personal brand management – or identity – can be very different for different people (and indeed on different platforms), but it represents a new element of the disciplinary society for people to navigate. In some instances, I think that you even see forms of self-regulation in offline life in anticipation of how one might appear online (e.g., being on hyper-alert towards photographs being taken when out with friends, knowing that there is every chance that you will be captured, posted and judged by others at any time).
It is extraordinary to be able to access information about individuals and to monitor others (that is, subject them to your gaze and judgement) in such an unprecedented way. But I think in many respects the key point may be that this ‘judging’ is mostly only ever latent or unrealised; what primarily happens is that people judge themselves and modify their behaviour according to their understandings of what is required, without anybody else necessarily paying that much attention. This was the ultimate point Foucault was making about normalisation – the sense of being surveilled is not the same as actually being watched. It is the relationship between what is supposed to happen (surveillance, monitoring and control) and what really goes on (their reactions to these mechanisms) which is interesting.
Anyway, sorry for the ramble – just some thoughts! Thanks again.
Hi Fuente,
There is soooo much here that we could discuss. I’m in agreement with 99% of what you say. It feels great to know that someone is engaging the ideas, thinking them through, and taking them beyond what I’ve tried to express. Thank you.
I’ll respond briefly to chunks of your text.
‘Justin is right in that the immediate prison metaphor does not seem appropriate. Nonetheless, there is much to be gained from thinking about the Panopticon and I think we need to think through how to build on the existing concept’.
This is precisely how I see it. The prison metaphor is inappropriate. But for Foucault, the Panopticon is not just a a prison or architectural concept, it is a diagram of power.
‘[A] social media user aims to project a particular image of her – or himself based on an understanding of what is appropriate, ‘cool’ or impressive (in simple terms, what is normal). This is not to say that this is ‘inauthentic’ or that they should automatically be criticised for ‘not being yourself’; it is more that this dynamic forms a key element of online behaviour’.
I am still unsure about the extent to which normalisation is a useful concept here, to be honest. Maybe it is appropriate: but it is a different form of normalisation to that which Foucault associates with disciplinary societies. I agree with Deleuze: people in the hi-tech consumerist world inhabit free-floating systems of control rather than disciplinary structures. The self that is crafted online is not an anxious, normalized, disciplinary subject – it is the empowered, aspiration self of the societies of control.
I talk about this in my latest post. I hope you enjoy it as much as this one!
Tim
Sorry, I am not familiar with the works of Deleuze, but what works of his (or what reference exactly) are you referring to?
I find this topic rather fascinating and I’m actually writing a paper on it.
So thanks for posting!
Any suggestions for academic sources relating to this topic? Obviously there’s Zuckerberg, and there’s Langdon Winner’s ideas (The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology) in some respects…
I have been thinking about this topic mainly in relation to the effect of govt surveillance in places such as China, but the idea of communal surveillance is also applicable.
Hi Kimmie,
Apologies – I somehow missed your comment.
The Deleuze text I’m referring to is ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’. Here’s a link to an online version: http://www.n5m.org/n5m2/media/texts/deleuze.htm
I’m afraid I can’t help you with academic references. I’m not affiliated with a university at the moment, so I don’t have access to an academic database. But I did a Google search and discovered (to my disappointment) that my thesis is not an original one http://facilegestures.com/2011/03/21/facebook-twitter-and-foucault/ There is a link at the bottom of this post to a 2008 article in TDR.
Tim
Hi Tim,
Thanks. However, I have already written my piece on this subject…and I got an A+! Was pretty happy with that!
…oh well, you’re probably still one of the first people to think about these connections regardless.
-Kimmie
So, what if you habitually share/perform, draw the spotlight, in your day-to-day thang, but you do it behind pseudonym, sorry, avatar? … and you keep your SM channels separate, with little cross over?
Anonymity is one way to avoid a virtual Panopticon. Hence the popularity of 4Chan and Anonymous. Another way is to accept that what one puts online is an avatar, simulacra, a performance – and use it. This is the strategy that I recommend.
I have been pondering the parallels between social media and Foucault’s Panopticon for a while now, and looking online in the hope of finding essays in which the the relationship was well-articulated. I think this piece makes the connection very well and is extremely thought-provoking. Much of the content you find online tends to skim the surface of ideas without going to deeper levels as you have. Thank you for this post and series!
Reblogged this on Martin leger med medier and commented:
Alle som interesserer sig for medieteori, eller måske bare godt kunne tænke sig et filosofisk perspektiv på, hvordan de bruger medierne, bør læse dette bloginlæg inkl. de to andre dele som der refereres til.
Jeg kan også tilføje Foucaults teorier til en anden sammenhæng. Donald Matheson bygger blandt andre på Foucaults panopticon-teori i sin analyse af forbrugermagasiner. Bogen hedder “Media Discourses” og kapitlet hedder “The Performance of Identity in Consumer Magazines”. bogen kan findes på Google Books eller via Ebrary Reader. Kan anbefales.
Hi.
Just wanted to say thanks for making Foucault easy to understand. I’ve tried to read up on his theories on my own with various degrees of success. If you’d like a different perspective on the panopticon metaphor, I would recommend you read Media Discourses by Donald Matheson. Look for the chapter “The Performance of Identity in Consumer Magazines”. He also elaborates more on Foucaults sexualization discourse, the idea of knowledge along with tid-bits from other philosophers.
Thanks for the kind remarks – and the reference. I’ll check it out.
Well, I’m not sure. It seems that Foucault was describing the growth of modern systems, and social media is a postmodern phenomenon, especially with regards to establishing the (objective) truth of any particular viewpoint. Any event will have a number of witnesses, but observing (tweeting) is also to enter a mediated relationship with a number of other people (followers). This mediated relationship in particular is something that I don’t think can really be accounted for with Foucault, who was at describing a different era at any rate.
I think the concept of performativity (which you mentioned) is perhaps a better approach to social media, although Foucault’s panopticon can still be usefully applied to subjects like CCTV surveillance.
Thanks for the reflection. I appreciate the critical feedback.
It is true that Foucault perceived the Panopticon to be emblematic of modern systems of power and disciplinary institutions. At the same time, he describes it (in vaguely Deleuzean terms) as a diagram of power, meaning a general strategy and technique that can be variously applied in different contexts. Surely it is not illegitimate, then, to explore how social media systems, by virtue of the visibility of actions undertaken within them, create a panopticonic effect, even if they have not been designed as panopticons? That is the extent of my argument as it concerns Foucault.
Great article Tim. It makes no doubt social media looks like a huge normalization engine. At the same time it is an affirmation one, so there is an interesting polarity here, because indeed you have at the same time more normalization (toward what is ‘hype’, the medium and the form) and less (toward authorship and the content). And it would be worth exploring a bit at what levels the two operate. Maybe this relates to what I have been wondering lately: the relationship between normalization (as a ‘pressure’/push self imposed or not to conform, fit in, comparison, foucauldian) and convergence (as an unfolding/pull towards an aspiration or attractor of some kind, iteration, hagelian as in power of pull)… Have you given it some thought?
The other thing that comes to mind while reading this article is the reverse panopticon. The social network as the surveillance eye for the behavior of the economic actors, the good and bad guys that can help transition to a better world if they were pushed or further pulled in certain direction. In this sense I think that the social object centered pull platform I have described below is a panopticon and I have conceived it as such -héhé!
…
http://menemania.typepad.com/helene_finidori/2012/02/engaging-for-the-commons.html
Thanks Helene. These are great insights. I love the idea of a relationship between normalization and convergence – indeed, I think this is key to what I am trying to express here… The way I set things up in these posts is somewhat inadequate, I feel. Individuals create their identities affirmatively online through sharing in public (all content being tagged with an existential marker). Yet there is another piece to the puzzle that is just as important: this concerns how we form value-based tribes in and through our self-creative sharing.
Here is an excerpt from another post I published recently, which is part of the same writing project. http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/the-gift-shift/#more-4751
“Think about how you form new friends online. As we share what we love and rummage about on our social networks for valuable content to share, we come across people who also love the things that we love. We ‘like’ them, ‘friend’ them, or follow them so that we can continue to share with them and receive what they share. In the process, we build social networks based in common values and interests.
This is how we form tribes. Tribes are united by common values and interests – in a word, love.
What is social about social media? The answer has nothing to do with ephemeral exchanges between individuals. What’s social about social media is the way that it enables us to form tribal groupings based about the things that we love. It hinges on the way that we achieve prominence and status in our tribes by virtue of the gifts that we share with them. It comes into focus when we see that by sharing with our tribes, we contribute to a common project – that of building a valuable common pool for everyone to enjoy, a commons chock full of expressions of love.”
When I speak of ‘crowds’ in the Foucault series, I am thinking primarily of ‘tribes’. This is the thought behind the idea of ‘the call of the crowd’: what compels us to share content is not just our desire to express our values and create ourselves online; it is the desire to belong to a community bound by common values – a tribe. My sense is that, when we put stuff online, we are putting it out first and foremost for our tribes. We don’t have a clear idea of who exactly is in these tribes, but ultimately that’s not important. What is important is that the value network is out there, and we feel that we are helping create and preserve it by contributing content.
The Next Edge and Socap communities were very much in my mind when I wrote these posts.
I will dive into your work on the commons and see it spurs me to further insights. I am sure it will! Thanks for sharing.
Hi Tim, how have you been? Just came across this one I hadn’t seen for a while, thought it might be relevant to this discussion we had a while back!
http://wiki.thetransitioner.org/English/Holopticism
I find this discussion extremely rich. My expertise is in designing and evaluating online learning systems for teachers of science across the United States at the National Science Teachers Association, which is materialized through an open portal that indeed attempts to converge social engagement with high quality content and psycho-emotional roles for recognition and growth as linked to their online profile. (see: http:learningcenter.nsta.org). We are experimenting with motivational badges, as well as ones that document self-directed learning, and have both national and private (local) leader boards. We have about 110,000 active users (with varying degrees of engagement), with tens of thousands of teachers spending hours online engaging in activities such as creating personal libraries, sharing collections, rating resources, discussing instructional strategies through integrated forums, attending live web seminars, etc. My limited understanding of these social/behaviorist/constructivist principles inform our design efforts and several studies of our work do seem to capture the value created via this system (as well as increased learning by those engaging with the content modules). That said, we do iteratively seek to improve our efforts.
In reading these insightful posts, I’m reminded of what is in part driving our next evolution of our system, that is, how to use the intrinsic motivation of the self-directed learners–who are often looking for on-demand, just-in-time, just-enough, just-for me support and resources for their classrooms based on their own unique learning needs and preferences, and coupling them with others with similar learning goals and interests. The idea of TRIBE hit home and in designing systems that begin with the individual, but then enable them to “connected” with others on similar learning journeys. For many teachers with limited time during the school day to “engage” in discourse with colleagues, the profession is often too isolated, so online systems that empower them to find and contribute with other tribal members is critical.
Here’s one example that illustrates my thinking. I took a wonderful trip to Breckenridge, Colorado two years ago. For one of the day’s events I signed our family up for a dog sled trip. It was an educational experience, where you spent the day with the dogs, learning about them, their value to the culture they supported, feeding them, etc., where at the end of the day you were able to ride a sled pulled by the team you interacted with earlier. This was an experience that was of a personal interest to me and my family. What I didn’t expect or anticipate was that when the van picked my family up outside of the hotel to take us to the camp, another family from Austraila was also in the van for the same experience. We suddenly were thrust together for the day, and while we didn’t know each other before this, our individual/personal interest had now unexpectedly conjoined us, and it wasn’t long until we were taking pictures of each other’s families, discussing how we raised our kids; we “bonded” over this mutual experience. That is when it “hit me”…how can we support individual learner’s needs while also simultaneously facilitating group “connections” too for learning with those of similar interest. These posts have shed light on these thoughts.
Finally, I’d like to comment about the “public surveillance” part of social systems references in these posts. I am not knowledgably in the psychology of those referenced herein, but have studied a little about learning theories (behaviorism, constructivism, situated cognition, etc.). What I can say anecdotally is that there is definitely something about the notion of online activity being recognized by those within and just on the periphery of the tribe. There is research that supports the importance of administrators in recognizing teachers’ efforts that teachers’ perception of what their administrator thinks of their work matters. With this knowledge and with systems that award points, badges, etc. we crafted sample “recognition” messages for administrators to share with their teachers to praise/congratulate the effort/contributions of those teachers in their cohorts (e.g., sharing files, contributing discussion posts to colleagues, passing final assessments at the end of web modules, etc.). A science methods professor using our system with her pre-service educators even commented upon a student’s placement on a local leader board, where everyone knew everyone else on the board, and in multiple cases, this “awareness” of individual’s efforts sparked higher levels of activity. So from a layman’s view there definitely seems to be something about the “fishbowl” effect of social media and its effect on the actions of those within the tribe.
Thank you again for the time to craft and posts these insights!
Thanks, Al, for sharing these comments. It is fascinating to learn about developments in the world of online learning. I moved out of academia just as e-learning was starting to kick in, and I haven’t kept up with what is happening (beyond browsing the occasional link shared on Twitter). It sounds like the trend towards ‘gamification’ seen in the online retailing sector is also impacting on e-learning. This can only be a good thing, I think.
The tribal metaphor is certainly a rich and flexible one. Tribes are self-organizing, values-based entities, bound together by reciprocity and mutual enthusiasm. Dave Logan’s book Tribal Leadership offers a wealth of insights into the forms of expression that mark out different order of tribes http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/06/28/a-step-by-step-guide-to-tribal-leadership-part-1-the-five-stages-of-tribal-culture/ – worth a look, if you haven’t already.
Good luck with your ongoing work, Al. And thanks again for your thoughts and comments,
Reblogged this on Issues in the History of Photography and commented:
Take a look folks!
Nice website! It was good meeting you at Mireille’s place!
Hi Anke,
Thanks! It was nice meeting you too!
Tim
Reblogged this on LOB ars communication´s virtual comments und kommentierte:
ComBridge: Recommended
Reblogged this on fredsnotes and commented:
Jeg ble ledet til denne bloggen via en av mine medstudenter i #etmooc, en online utforskelse av utdanning, teknologi og media. (www.etmooc.org). Akkurat nå handler det om “the open movement”. Samtidig har jeg nylig leste en del av det som er skrevet om Google Glass, og hvordan det kan påvirke oss når vi plutselig vet at alt vi gjør og sier kan bli tatt opp og lagret.
Det er mange år siden jeg leste Foucault, men han virker mer relevant nå enn da jeg leste ham på 80-tallet.
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