a little social media commentary

"...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; Ishare 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."

this really captures my view on social media at the moment, in essence its really a curated platform of expression, and alot of times what people share often points me to:

a) what they want people to see them engaging in (e.g eating at certain restaurants, meeting with certain people, traveling to certain places etc, whatever other desirable activities), sometimes certain emotions, and feelings.

b) interests in books, music, movies they want to be associated with etc, viewpoints, philosophies

of course there are some extremely honest bits of sharing done on social platforms but i believe a large number of participants, me included, do curate content quite abit - here i'm talking about the narrative we give of our lives. for instance, people largely share photos of themselves or food eaten at places that are deemed "desirable", places to be seen at and go to. same goes for everything else: most people do not take "outfit shots" of themselves wearing things they sleep in (except as a joke), also no one posts photos of themselves all zitty during their periods, or slumped over their desks looking crazy while studying, or uploads "foodie" photos of their 2am nissin cup noodles. list goes on about the amount of curation that goes on such that the less glamourous parts of our lives are nicely edited out of the broadcasts of our lives.

so i guess my point is that every time you feel a little envious of someone's social media thread/timeline etc, just remember that 95% of that is probably a curated expression of what they want you to see about them. i'm most aware of this because i too am a participant of such an exercise. you're most likely not going to see the tiny tragedies that pepper my life.

another curious little offering from social media: what people share (again, myself included) reveals quite abit about how they would like to curate themselves, and by extension, what they are concerned with - ideal image, insecurities etc. every individual broadcasted narrative reveals something to me about a person, as creepy as that sounds...in this day and age, with social media, you can technically infer things (quite accurately) about a person you haven't ever met.

nonetheless, i think social media is truly fascinating...and such a useful tool at that!