UMBCMCS355 Spring 18

As someone who doesn’t normally post on any social media anymore, besides the occasional happy birthday post to select friends on facebook or food pictures on snapchat, I will say that I once was also wrapped up in how many likes and followers I would get on Instagram. It amazes and interests me know how other people as well as myself can so easily get caught up in these numbers. French philosopher Michel Foucault developed a theory called the panopticon effect, which inspiration comes from Benthem’s panopticon design of a jail cell. Foucault believed it “[induces] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201). This theory can be applied to social media today in that we are constantly being monitored by our presence online. Online whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc can always be monitored/viewed because a friend or follower could randomly search you up for whatever reas...

Foucault believes that social media is used as a medium to create subjectivation of an identity of who we want outsiders to perceive us as. Social media platforms are our own personal stages to perform a sophisticated, thought out, act that displays our very best selves. It is our aesthetic and our comfort zone (depending on which medium is being used). What we share is the primary system to show the world what our intended identity is. Though I say ‘intended’, I mean that we pick and choose pieces of our personality that fit what we believe the audience wants to receive. “ Effective use of social media implies selecting and framing content with a view to pleasing and/or impressing a certain crowd” (Rayner, 2012). At what point is it too much for our psyches to remember who we really are? How can one have a genuine personality on social media when there is time to edit out the parts that may seem less desirable? Foucault mentions the Panopticon, “ comprised of a ring of cells surround...

The self is a work in progress, it is an art, it is full of contradictions. I spend a lot of time on the internet and therefore a lot of myself has melded into my internet persona. I am brutally honest in everything I post, at times to a fault. I am extremely transparent to the point that my grandmother will call me to check on me and ask if I am alright when I am posting an unusual amount. I do not hold back on stupid videos , or music videos , or memes that I may be the only person to ever like . The fact that I am so open on the internet, if I may be completely honest, gave me an incredibly difficult task of figuring out what exactly I would not post. At first I thought I would post just about anything, until I did a bit of self reflection about who I really am on the internet. Michel Foucault’s idea of subjectivation, in which one becomes a subject, has a lot to do with the Internet’s role in our lives and how we interact with it. Although he was before the Internet’s time...

            Social media has created an outlet for many people, including myself, whom have a hard time expressing ourselves in a way that can be considered one-dimensional. However, the idea of subjectivation that stems from Foucault’s argument reveals that we are unconsciously being judged and criticized based on what content we share. This leads us to desperately create or share posts that reflect us in a positive way depending on who is seeing our content. In the second part of the blog post, when thinking about what to share we consider it a “…performance: creatively determined by user, yet commanded by presence of an expectant crowd,” (Rayner, 2012). As a person of who has a multitude of interests and values as well as an active user of social media, it used to be mind-numbing to determine what content to share.             As a child, I was always s...