![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFellow Queen's alumnus Clifford just posted an essay, "Social Media and the Panopticon", talking about the implications of our panopticonic society. After the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, he notes, you had the Vancouverite masses take part in a concerted effort to identify as many rioters as they could. And it was all spontaneous. We live in a world where the panopticon is run by its nominal subjects, who are in a strange way empowered by it.
A world of billions of people dominated by the norms of small villages? Or, perhaps more accurately, a world of an near-infinite number of communities based on interests and geography and culture and history and the like that are as efficiently and ruthlessly self-governing as any mob?
I wrote earlier about China's "human flesh search engine", the aggregate population of Internet users who see a wrong then go on to identify said and make sure the culprits are thoroughly crushed. China, in this as in other things, may be leading the world.
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.
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.
[. . .]
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.
A world of billions of people dominated by the norms of small villages? Or, perhaps more accurately, a world of an near-infinite number of communities based on interests and geography and culture and history and the like that are as efficiently and ruthlessly self-governing as any mob?
I wrote earlier about China's "human flesh search engine", the aggregate population of Internet users who see a wrong then go on to identify said and make sure the culprits are thoroughly crushed. China, in this as in other things, may be leading the world.
