Facebook as the Panoptic Model of Social Control

If only Foucault could see Facebook--I shudder at the thought. But at the same time, I feel ambivalence—Facebook is the offspring of our generation, and it is symptomatic of our cultural mentality to connect and communicate our individuality. In fact, critiquing Facebook feels somewhat futile—why? For one thing, once you become a ‘user’ and create a profile, the myth is that your profile can never be deleted. As much as my friends and I use this argument to justify not immediately deleting our accounts, there is something to be said about the anxiety within or without this social network. Central to this anxiety is the Foucauldian notion that identity is constructed for others according to a coercive model of subjectivity and surveillance. Facebook is a quintessential panoptic model because it creates the illusion of automatism where social relations actually conform to a set discourseare in fact governed by its own discourse.
After reading Foucault’s “Discipline and Punishment” I began to think about our participation on the Internet, and how Facebook renders this participation even more transparent. According to Foucault, the panoptic model of Western institutions is disciplinary to the extent that subjects internalize this coercion (PAGE). Like Panopticism, information isn’t made available to better know our world or ourselves, rather information is deployed to create us as consumers and users. Yet our participation ‘On-line’ is considered to be a kind of freedom the Internet is considered above hierarchal institutions in the real world. Is the Internet an assymetrical model of panoptic control? Foucault would argue that like the prisoner, our every click is visible and every screen backlit and surveyed (Foucault 548). Our voyeuristic participation, it could be argued, has been a slow conditioning of ‘the gaze’ from cinema to television, the Internet, instant messaging, and now—Facebook.
What are we talking about when we critique the concept of the ‘Internet’ or ‘Facebook?’ As objects of study, these networks themselves prove elusive and untraceable. Again, this is part of the panoptic model of social control. Foucault writes that political instruments for acquiring and creating a knowledge of the body are “diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous, systematic discourse…it is generally no more than a multiform of instrumentation…Moreover, it cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus” (549) Likewise, the Internet is not one institution, nor can one institution be analyzed according to the end effect. From the participant’s perspective, there are no boundaries to the ‘actions’ of the Internet, and therefore the Internet appears to be an arbitrary creation of usership at any one point in time. In other words, through individual’s creative input, the Internet exists. But this is also flawed. Foucault’s point is that in the absence of violent control, social institutions have created an asymmetrical discourse that makes it impossible to think outside the Internet. This is a difficult notion to wrap one’s head around.
Furthermore, a Foucauldian analysis of subjectivity and surveillance provides insight into how coercive structural implications of social media are normalized. I remember the giddy excitement my seventh grade self felt when a new first instant message popped up on the browser. Then, it was slightly eerie that my friend was waiting for my reply at that very moment. Now, however I feel comfortable with the idea, and take part in a new level of intrusive behavior. As Foucault contends, “Power-knowledge is not who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known…” (550). I know the extent to which Facebook influences my understanding of mine and others’ exhibitionism, but do I realize the extent to which my exhibitionism is controlled through and analyzed within Facebook? Commercially, Facebook has revolutionized the way the Internet monitors our consumer choices and behaviors.
Not only do the pop-ads on the sidebar show Facebook’s attentiveness to the interests that I put forth on my profile, but my Facebook is an “enclosed segmented space, observed at every point…in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined, and distributed…” (Foucault 552). I am an actor in constructing my own script—through wall postings, photos, and profile information. Yet this script, in its individualized visibility, “is a trap” (554). To be a part of this surveillance system, one must first conform to a “system of permanent registration” (551), a process that requires one to submit to “binary division and branding, coercive assignment, of differential distribution…” (553). To create a profile, one must choose an identity (gender, sexuality, poltical, geographical, religious) on Facebook’s terms. In a previous class, we tried to create a profile on Facebook that didn’t identify according to gender or sexuality, and it was absolutely impossible. In sum, behaviors and identities on Facebook are in fact rule-governed, and therefore coercive.
Despite the fact that our participation as visible subjects is so obvious, there is anxiety at the sheer number of temporary observers and guilt at our own surveillance of others. Think about the number of pictures you untag for instance. You can’t delete them, why disassociate them from your name when everyone knows that was you with a mullet in the 4th grade? A leading neuroscientist thinks this is because social networking induces the “infantilisim of the mind” and “extreme narcissism.” If this is true, what does this mean for the economic or social utility of Facebook in the real world? Foucault thought that power sought to create subjectivities according to social utility and productivity. Apart from its commercial value, the time we spend on Facebook does not appear to be of any utilitarian value. Rather, if it threatens our work productivity and destabilizes identity, how can this possibly be valuable in the real world? Lets just hope Facebook continues to make poor choices in layout—or even begins to charge for use—then what point will there be in taking part? The illusion with Facebook is that these social relations are in fact created in virtual networking. I do believe they will exist before and after I log on.