My undergraduate degree is in criminology and you can bet we spent many hours in that program discussing different theories and studies of surveillance. So when the subject of surveillance in social media came up I was definitely interested. The discussion though has had the side effect of making me feel surveilled in my online activity. I feel watched by friends, colleagues, my professor, future employers, future students, and maybe even the government!
It started with Anders Albrechtslund and his article Online Social Networking As Participatory Surveillance. Albrechtslung suggests classical theories of surveillance, like Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and the theories of Michel Foucault, fail to cover the widespread participation in social media. He supports an expansion of current surveillance theories to incorporate a more horizontal structure instead of top down. For support, he illustrates how through social media people voluntarily open themselves up to public scrutiny. Even just the information you have to enter to create an online profile for facebook or twitter impressive. Then once you have that account, you participate in sharing details of you life to the world, without really thinking about it.
This is the crutch of the matter. We do it without really thinking about it. When we share something on facebook we don’t think about the world reading it, we see it as sharing it with our friends. I knew, but didn’t really think about, all the ways in which the things I post online could be used. My words can be taken out of context and used in ways I never intended, my birthday party photos used against me at a job interview, my profiles scanned for criminal tendencies. Sure I knew these things were a possibility but not until recently have I really though about it and now I am feeling it’s full effect.
One of the benefits of online interactions, including social media, is the freedom to express yourself,converse and connect with others, share. I like sharing. But now I feel watched and the freedom is gone. I want to share my thoughts and feelings but fear how they will be taken out of context and used against me and I won’t have the chance to defend myself. I might not even know it’s happening. And that was the function of the panopticon: each prisoner was isolated and arranged so each individual at any given moment could be observed from the guard post but the prisoner never knew when he was being observed and so acted as if he were being observed at all times. In the social media panopticon the person in the guard post could be anyone and they can observe not only your current behaviour but all your past behaviour as well. And you don’t know when they’re watching.
So now, living in a new place away from the people I like to share things with, I hesitate to reach out and share like I did before. The effect will fade, I’m sure, but it doesn’t mean the surveillance in social media fades with it. I guess it’s like coming to terms with the millions of cameras on city street corners.