Followers:

SOCIAL MEDIA CULTURE AS MASS PANOPTIC CONTROL

Dagmawi Gebre Yntiso

Contemporary Debates in Social Theory
University of Jyväskyla
November 2016
 Contents

Introduction 1

The Dialectic… and Mass Culture 2

Foucault and Panopticism 3

Social Media ‘Culture’ 4

Social Media as Panoptic Control 5

Consumerism 6
Acceptance of Narratives 6
Homogeneity 7

Conclusion 7

References
1. Introduction

One of the strangest issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaigns was the
proliferation of absolute lies and fabrications by both sides of the debate. Throughout the
elections, it was obvious that Truth would take on its more relativistic meanings, with both
Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Democratic and Republican candidates respectively,
making claims that would later turn out to be false. On social media, the problem was
exacerbated as lies and propaganda became amplified, with people sharing the more sensational
stories. In the end, it was difficult to know what to believe.

However, in all this media activity, one thing was clear: people were responding to ideas
and concepts on the basis of what they were exposed to, and what they were exposed to was
based on what they had reacted to earlier (through likes on Facebook, or the suggestions of their
friends and followers), creating a situation where people more or less discussed the same issues
and held on to the same opinions (Hilary is a liar, Trump is a bigot), with actual political analysis
in the public sphere practically nonexistent. However, this is in keeping with overall trends in
social media, which increasingly seeks to create an army of similar-minded consumers with no
real knowledge of, or power in, the political process.

My thesis is that one of the effects of social media is to create a society in which people
are constantly monitoring each other and themselves in order to align with the needs of global
liberal capitalist society. The demand to consume; the acceptance of dominant narratives on
social, political and economic events; and the overall need to homogenize society are all
promoted through the likes of Facebook and Google. For this analysis, I will draw on the concept
of mass media as a culture industry, as outlined in Horkheimer and Adornos’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment and the concept of panopticism as described in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and
Punish. In addition, I will include Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption to
discuss the consumerist aspects of social media.

Overall, I hope to use the concepts of culture industry and panopticism individually to
explain certain phenomenon in social media. Together, they help to view social media as yet
another form of control. I will begin by describing each of the major works and the concept of
social media, and then explore current social media trends through the Dialectic and
panopticism. Specifically, I will attempt to elaborate on three aspects of social media that the two

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ideas can explain. I close with a conclusion and some words on the implications for today’s
‘revolutionary’ movements and suggestions for further questions.

2. The Dialectic… and Mass Culture

The seminal text of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory established in Germany
around the time of World War II, The Dialectic of Enlightenment is an ambitious work. It
attempts to explain the failure of the Age of Enlightenment, or ‘why humanity, instead of
entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.’(Horkheimer and Adorno,
preface) In others words, how ‘enlightened’ thought could have led to Auschwitz. Drawing on
multiple sources, the work attempts to prove its central thesis, which is that myth contains
enlightenment, and that enlightenment reverts to myth. The latter case regards both the atrocities
of the 20th century and positivist turn that Reason has taken, being used as merely a tool to
achieve ends, as opposed to being treasured in its own right (for example, with Kant).

By looking at history, Horkheimer and Adorno show how civilization went from mimesis
(a form of reasoning based on sympathy, or ‘like begets like’, e.g. the use of voodoo), to myth
(where divine forces began having an influence on human affairs), to metaphysics (represented at
the apex by Kant, where Reason results in autonomous individuals who operate in the world
based on their interest) and finally positivism (which uses reason to achieve goals). The last step
is what the writers criticize most strongly, as it represents the collapse of the individual to a mere
subject at the hands of the state (the political angle), liberal capitalism (the economic angle) and
mass culture (the cultural angle) through the operations of instrumental rationality.

My thesis regards this last aspect. The culture industry that the writers identify (discussed
more extensively in Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered) is based on mass media, the
content for which is by necessity adapted to mass consumption. The writers see mass culture as a
means to control society by providing empty cultural products as distraction. People consume
products unquestioningly and any dissent or critique is merely ignored. Mass culture is based on
recycled clichés and prevents sustained thought. While ‘this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no
dignity to man's lives’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 139), it is needed as ‘an escape from the
mechanized work process’ (137).

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 One of the effects of this commodification of cultural products is that society becomes
homogenized. The authors write, ‘something is provided for all so that none may escape; the
distinctions are emphasized and extended,’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 123) and ‘all the living
units crystallize into well-organized complexes.’ (120) The writers also touch on advertising,
noting that ‘in advertising … the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into
psycho- technology, into a procedure for manipulating men’ (161) and that it makes consumers
compelled to buy. While the authors were referring to cinema and radio in their discussion of the
culture, this set of descriptions almost perfectly captures the current state of social media, as will
be discussed later.

3. Foucault and Panopticism

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian of ideas who wrote Discipline
and Punish partly as a result of his activism in prison reform in France. While not necessarily a
structuralist, Foucault’s work was concerned overall with the influence of power structures on
the individual. For instance, Foucault would describe the position of the student as being in
which the student takes on a specific role within a given structure (the university) and comes to
identify with that role and discipline him/herself accordingly. For Foucault, there is no need for a
particular authority, as people come to govern themselves.

Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, essentially presents the history of the penal
system. Foucault notes that in the past (pre-18th century), punishment involved spectacle:
hangings were basically forms of public entertainment, the power of the king was made visible
for all to see. Through reform and on the basis of former modes of discipline (which involved
timetables, drills, etc. to control physical bodies), the modern prison was born.

An original form was the panopticon, envisioned by British philosopher and social
reformer, Jeremy Bentham. The panoption was a structure which housed prison cells in a circular
building, at the center of which was an observation tower. The prisoners were under constant
surveillance, but could not see inside the tower themselves, thereby ensuring that the prisoners
self-disciplined, even in the absence of an actual authority. Foucault writes, ‘The Panopticon is a

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marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous
effects of power.’ (Foucault, 202)

While the pre-modern forms of punishment served to control bodies, the modern
disciplines served to control souls. Foucault’s idea here is that modern forms of discipline
essentially create the soul, or the psyche or consciousness (as something to be controlled). In
light of the social media trend, my observation is that the same gaze that operates in the
panotpicon now operates on a massive scale, not just from one central authority to the masses,
but the masses among themselves. Foucault argues that the disciplines created norms (instead of
people merely being punished for their crimes, the panoptic gaze of society promotes a set of
values with which people align their behavior). Visibility in social media is what forces people to
conform to certain modern norms (in this case, certain ideologies, consumerism, etc.) and as
Foucalut points out, ‘visibility is a trap.’ (Foucault, 200)

4. Social Media ‘Culture’

Social media is the name given the set of computer tools used to share information and
ideas through virtual networks. It is central part of ‘Web 2.0’ (1.0 being defined by tools such as
email) and is currently enjoying a huge surge in popularity all over the world. Content on these
sites (which include Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, reddit, and even the blogging trend, to
name the dominant examples) can be either reproduced or user-generated and the essential
feature of social media is the network. While there are different sites and applications, the
essential features are to post/publish, comment and like. What is key to my thesis is not so much
social media per se but the social media mentality, which sees all information as postable,
rewards users through short confirmations of approval (the Facebook like, for example) and
essentially attempts to swallow everything into its sphere of influence. In fact, the a primary goal
of the social media business is to gather as many people as possible, regardless of any potential
social cost of mediating interaction over cyberspace.

In social media, one’s exposure is limited to what has already approved (or liked), what
one’s friends have suggested and, through a series of complex algorithms, what one is likely to
enjoy. In this way, the set of ideas, products and lifestyles that one can choose from becomes

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limited. As a result, people’s behavior becomes highly predictable. Add to this the fact that the
value system of social media encourages conformity by basing giving attention to those whose
activity is more representative of the group ideal, and what you have is a structure which
systematically ensures that a homogenized society filled with individuals targeting one goal: the
accumulation of social capital through the purchase of (real and virtual) products. This is all
accomplished through the psychological manipulation of existing personal dispositions
(empathy, for example), as Dr. Larry Rosen points out when he says that ‘(The Facebook like) is
an example of virtual empathy. . .having the ability to understand and share in another’s
emotional state or context’. (Rosen, 2012)

How does this relate mass culture and panopticism? As Horkheimer and Adorno point
out, mass culture tends to homogenize individuals, provide emotional relief through
entertainment and block out dissent: these are some of the central characteristics just described
about social media. From the Foucauldian angle of visibility-as-trap, it is clear to see that
people’s constant observability in the social media space forces a certain level of conformity.
The mass cultural and panoptic aspects of social media work together to create the (arguably
degraded) state we live in today, where the most viewed video on YouTube is of a nonsensical
dance craze (Gangnam style, with nearly 3 billion views) and with a corporate-state
superstructure which has been found to monitor virtually all activities. The power of the medium
to create literal followers (in an almost religious sense) is highlighted by a case in which the CIA
recently attempted to create a social media platform in Cuba to promote agitation against the
current regime. (Guardian, 2014)

5. Social Media as Panoptic Control

There are three effects of social media that I believe The Dialectic and Foucault can help explain.
The first is increased consumerism, driven in part by a sort of conspicuous consumption, the
second is the unquestioning acceptance of narratives on social, economic and political issues and
the third is an emergent tendency to homogenize society caused in part by the first two.

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 5.1 Consumerism

The consumerist side of social media exists on two spheres: the need to purchase goods
and the need to purchase culture. Both operate on similar levels. Often, what sites like Amazon
or eBay suggest to us are based on our google searches, or what those in our circles are buying.
The more recent trend, especially on Facebook, of placing ads directly on people’s pages makes
it so that it is impossible to escape advertising targeted specifically to one’s tastes. Cultural
products (like the Gangnam style video) are also purchased in a sense, as we invest time to watch
or listen to them, and in doing so also garner some measure of profit for the owner of the
YouTube channel (through clickable ads). Through all this, others can observe one’s purchasing
habits and as a result, there is a need to perform in a sense. Thorstein Veblen’s concept of
conspicuous consumption may be useful here. Veblen observed that people tend to buy things to
‘keep up with the Joneses’, or to display one’s wealth to others. He writes, ‘In order to stand well
in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite,
conventional standard of wealth.’ (Veblen, 19) In the case online, this same need to show-off
appears to operate, though more with one’s ability to conform to group values, and not
necessarily actual wealth (although this certainly plays a role, as evidenced by the popularity of
those who gain internet fame through displays of ostentatious wealth).

5.2 Acceptance of Narratives

These days, people receive information almost in the same way they receive
entertainment: through a steady stream of bit-size excerpts. This stream is again based on
previous viewing habits, the suggestions of friends and similar tools. The homogenizing effect
here is clear: rather than Truth, it is popularity that determines how valuable a piece of
information is. As a result, discourse gets reduced to trivia, as news becomes another form of
entertainment. This was seen rather shockingly in the U.S. presidential elections, where even the
public debates (originally an institution that served to educate the masses) were nothing more
than amusing shouting matches. More importantly, the tendency for information to be filtered
completely ignores the question of facts. As Horkheimer and Adorno point out, the subject is the
receptacle of information. In a world awash in information and where nothing seems certain,
ironically anything can be true. This is complicated by the fact that these same media

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corporations (Facebook, Google) can sometimes work with the state to further certain narratives.
A recent analysis shows, for example, that during the presidential elections, Google searches
favored positive stories of Hilary Clinton (normally, searches are neutral, based on an algorithm
that works on search frequency). (Hadfield, 2016)

5.3 Homogeneity

The end result of the consumerist and ideological trends alluded to above is that people
ultimately begin buying similar things, thinking similar thoughts, discussing the same issues
through the same arguments, and perhaps most importantly, developing similar frames of mind.
As we are constantly confirmed in our opinions and preferences, the system can endlessly
reproduce itself. Dissent is quite easily removed by removing its visibility (unpopular opinions
and stories are seen by few). The world created is one in which conformity is virtue. The
universal desire to see oneself as a projection of social values (being in-the-know, possessing
status) combined with an immediate feedback mechanism (i.e. the system that tells you whether
or not you are doing the right things in real-time) not only results in homogeneity, but
exponentially accelerates it.

6. Conclusion

The trend I have attempted to describe is one of increasing atomization of the individual,
homogenization of society and maximization of profit through the reduction of social interaction
to bankable transactions between seemingly free agents. Issues regarding audience participation
and affective labor have not even been discussed, but this is an area worth exploring. Mass media
culture originally created prefabricated ideas (as discussed in the Dialectic…), which was
difficult enough to counter, but now the advent of social media is making it so that individuals
themselves are the creators of this content, resulting in an endlessly reproducible system that is
difficult to change.

If there is one lesson for the social media radicals attempting to create a better, more free society
through forming Facebook groups and elaborating on their ideas on Twitter it is precisely that

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the world cannot change while the likes of Facebook and Google continue to operate within it.
Many have already noted social media’s inability to genuinely effect social change (see for
example Gladwell, 2010) and to this, I would add that the values inherent in a social media-
saturated society (the need to consume and to conform) are antithetically opposed to the values
which are in my opinion needed to create a more just, transparent society.

Finally, there may be a possibility to elaborate on the works of Horkheimer and Adorno and
Foucualt. In the case of the former, while it is true that mass culture tends to homogenize, I think
there is something to be studied in the fact that culture today is not produced by a set of artists or
experts but rather everyone (the number of online amateur musicians and artists is unimaginably
large). How does this affect the diversity or products available. With regard to Foucault, one
might ask what happens when the panoptic gaze is directed, not as it was originally from a
central authority to the subjects, but among the subjects themselves? Finally, does Veblen’s
conspicuous consumption apply equally well to situations where wealth isn’t the measure of
status, but rather likability?

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References

Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Verso, 1997

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault (translated by Alan Sheridan),
Vintage Books, 1995
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, Thorstein
Veblen, A.M. Kelley, 1912
‘Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted’, Malcom Gladwell, The New Yorker,
October 4, 2010 (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-
gladwell)
‘Report: Google Search Bias Protecting Hillary Clinton Confirmed in Experiment’, Jack
Hadfield, Breitbart News, September 13, 2016
(http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/13/hillary-google-bias-confirmed-experiment/)

‘The Power of ‘Like’: We Like Being Liked…on Facebook’, Larry Rosen, Psychology Today,
July 15, 2012 (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rewired-the-psychology-
technology/201207/the-power)

‘US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government’, The Guardian,
April 3, 2014 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-
unrest)