Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry.

There’s a splendid series of articles over at O’Reilly Media concerning the dark side of social media by Joshua-Michéle Ross. The first of these, The Digital Panopticon, was drawn to my attention by Antony Mayfield today.

[This post is terribly unpolished – my books are in boxes for a couple of weeks, so only internet research here – and also, I am a critical theory dilettante at the best of times].

The Panopticon, as you probably know, was a scarily-perfect model of perpetual surveillance in a prison, first mooted by Jeremy Bentham, one of the great philosophers of The Enlightenment. Prisoners in such an institution may be observed at any time and they’re unable to tell whether or not they’re being watched. Thus, they’re kept in continual paranoia. Many prisons, including current-day institutions like London’s Pentonville and Pelicon Bay in California, are believed to be inspired by the Panopticon model.

Josh suggests, and I am bound to agree somewhat, that social media technologies have a strong panoptical element:

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance — of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

Josh’s point is that we somehow accept social media networks as empowering, democratic and all about spreading fresh ideas. The reverse may be the case: any given information about ourselves donates some portion of control to another party.

Let’s take this across to one model of critical theory. Post-structuralist modernist (I get my posts mixed up) philosopher Michel Foucault back in the 70s picked up and ran with the idea of the Panopticon, especially in his best-known work Discipline and Punish. His idea was that Bentham’s model wasn’t just an idea for a prison; but for a society.

He argued that prisons are a really new idea. Back in the past, we simply thrashed/burned/drowned/stabbed transgressors. That all changed in the C18th with the Enlightenment . The idea of law-enforcement was ‘enlightened’ with the  understanding that resources [people] didn’t need to be wasted and that better social control is exercised through freely-given compliance, rather than co-option.

People could be turned into machines, a consequence of political thinking in the emergence of industrial society and the rush to efficiency and cost-allocation. Once properly mechanised, they could be ‘trusted’ – the scare quotes, because the trusted prisoner is no longer human. A big part of that process is surveillance: once people know that they are always (potentially) watched, they’re a bit more compliant to the rules, and a bit more like machines.

The genius of the current model is that we are self-surveillant, of course. We willingly offer our identity, friends, thoughts and so-forth, to the all-seeing eyes of anyone who can be bothered to set up an appropriate search alert. We’re consequently a bit less likely to say or do things that fall outside the accepted models of political and corporate behaviour.

Foucault saw this coming in what was happening back in the C18th. Foucault observed that over the period of that century, the exercise of power changed from explicitly keeping people down to encouraging people to express themselves (and then governing that), rather than repressing expression as in the earlier model. Foucault’s ideas of power produced knowledge, produced information, produced pleasure – in the right directions. Creating knowledge, creating information is a form of surrender in this model.

It produced (arguably) blog-conversations, for example. They are a discourse, in his terminology – conversations that follow an agreed etiquette, language and code – creating implicitly agreed audience-identities and scope. If you cannot submit to that discourse, you cannot be a part of it. I can’t explore that fully right now, but blog conversation as discourse is a rich course of enquiry, I promise.

One small part of this to pick out: Foucault remarked on the way people could now be disciplined by:

tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical

How perfect a description is that of the unfollow, unfriend, forum-ban, IP-ban?

For dozens of contemporary examples, check out this issue of Surveillance and Society, though it is very academic.

And where is transgression in social media?

It is simply not allowed to exist in many cases. No, wacky viral videos and satire along the lines of the Daily Show do no not count – the former often serve Capitalism, the remainder and all of the latter are our current carnivalesque release-valve on norms that really couldn’t care less about political change. Porn doesn’t count either, because it’s so fully and perfectly Capitalist in the first place.

Blogs you don’t like: don’t subscribe/unsubscribe – you get the Daily Me; Facebook people get unfriended if they say the wrong thing; unsavoury Twitter followers are not followed or blocked. Bland self-approval of the group takes over. There are no racists on my spectrum right now. As far as I am concerned, they don’t exist. But that’s not the real story, clearly. Racists are poised to take Stoke in the next by-election. They don’t appear on my spectrum because I have deliberately blinded myself to their existence on a day-to-day basis. Diversity of opinion is purely opt-in (with strong incentives to opt-out) in socialmediaworld.

In socialmediaworld, there’s consequently no-one who wants to topple our social democracy. Almost everything that I see, and almost anything I am likely to see, is already ranked (Google) and focused (Twitter) through the twin lenses of liberal democracy. Minority views are excluded by the machine – only the recommended and personalised is allowed through. The stuff that dulls and comforts the political imagination. Foucault talked about a ‘new economics of power’ with regard to the French media of the 70s – he would have so relished and reviled our current political abstinence and lack of ideas.

Transgression has almost ceased to exist. Almost. Look to the unchampioned uninnovative for that: IRC, usenet, forums, web-sites.

Terribly unpopular post on ‘innovation and politics’ to follow…