Essay: "Social Media and the Panopticon"

I was not particularly surprised by the riots after Vancouver lost game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.  That kind of thing is nothing new, but you wouldn't know it from all the tut-tutting.  I think the spread of digitical cameras and social media made the stupidity and destruction of the riots hit home in a new way, much the same way that the photograph brought home the horrors of the American Civil war.


Which brings me to what does surprise me - the massive backlash against the rioters through social media.  In particular, I was surprised of the spontaneous organization of people to both clean up after the riots, and to identify and round up the riorters (many of whom were stupid enough to allow themselves to be photographed, or, in some cases, photograph themselves).

When people think of surveillance, they generally think of a powerful government figures scrutinizing their every move (Big Brother).  Of course, no government has the resources to watch all of its citizens all of the time.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the narrator Winston noted there was only a 20% chance of someone watching you through the telescreen at any time.  But what if instead of a central figure spying on us all at once like the Eye of Sauron, we all agreed to watch each other?

Jeremy Bentham imagined a prison called the panopticon, where one guard in a central tower can look at all of the cells around him.  Michel Foucault incorporated this prison into his philosophy in Discipline and Punish.  He wrote:

... it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two.  Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

Foucault also wrote that "permanent visibility assures the automatic functioning of power" because the prisoner alwasy felt he was being watched, and so he didn't have to be.

For Foucault the principle of the panopticon (panopticism) underlies many institutions in society (hospitals, mental asylums, schools).  But in "panopticism" (and this is critical) there was no one central authority who continuously watches everyone from the central tower.  Instead, the tower is accessible to anyone, who can watch everyone else at any time.  So although power was not centralized, it was still omnipresent. In fact, by distributing power to everyone, it became more prevalent in society. It is everywhere, in every aspect of life.

In a strange way, then, living in a panoptic world is both more and less free than living under a tyrant. More free, because everyone is on the same level. Less free, because at least under a tyrant you are free when you are outside of his gaze.  Under panopticism, you are never outside of the gaze of authority because we have all been trained to watch each other.

As I mentioned, in our society, this heightened scrutiny is often entirely voluntary.  People choose to put themselves in the fishbowl.  We laugh at the douchebags that posted pictures of themselves setting cars on fire, but it's only a dumb manifestation of a universal desire.  We all seem to crave that scrutiny.  That's why we post pictures on the Internet, along with our opinions and what we had for dinner.

If you read my essay on Deus Ex, you might remember a computer told the protagonist that human beings desire judgment and to be assimilated into higher forms of meaning.  In other words, we want to be watched.  We want everyone to see us, to know what we're doing.  And we want to watch others too.

Until now, our ability to see and be seen was limited by technology.  When I was in my house, ten years ago, there wasn't much I could do to talk to people except call them up, one at a time.  Social media is changing that.  It's connecting us in a way that we just weren't connected before.  It brings us together.  And this big thing we're all a part of has an unprecedented power to judge.

What are the consequences of this new world? It's tempting to be super-negative (Foucault sure as shit was).  But let's think of the positives. Think of all those jackass rioters that are being brought to justice who would have previously escaped in the anonymity of the mob.  And it doesn't just work on rioters - remember the police officers who misbehaved and were busted during the G20 fiasco.  This sort of public shaming can be brought to bear on other wrongdoers as well: lazy TTC workers, drunk drivers, out-of-control celebrities. Who knows?

The panopticon of social media both weakens and empowers the mob.  Weakens it because people lose anonymity.  But empowers it becuase it becomes much easier to identify and marshall disapproval against people who act outside of social norms.

It's a little disturbing; a crushing force for totalitarianism.  One thing Orwell got right - the tyranny in Oceania never game from Big Brother (he might have been dead). It came because people organized into a society that did nothing put "press on the nerve of power."  O'Brien told Wintson to imagine the future of the human race as a "boot stamping on the human face - forever."

People think a dictatorship will arise through a revolution or through the subversion of our government by sinister politicians.  But we could not have a dictatorship without the a majority of society deciding to organize ourselves in that way.  And that we might be more willing to do so then you might think.

We are moving, voluntarily, into a world like the one described by Foucault: where everyone observes and judges one another. We won't necessarily be less free, but we will certainly be much more watched.  It will be a powerful shift away from an individualized, private world to one where everyone lives under the gaze of their colleagues and neighbors.  If that's what we want, then that's what we'll get.