The Panopticon
Marketing as marketing disappears within the viral networks of social media platforms. Boundaries are broken down between marketers and kids (as kids market to each other); between content and advertising (as advertising now infuses, rather than interrupts, content); and between kids’ lives and entertainment (as their lives now become the content of that entertainment). It is truly the “perfection of [marketers’] power.” Kids, like the prisoners in the Panopticon, now bear the power marketing holds over them, and the marketers, like the Panopticon’s guards, drop from view, their power now automatic and self-executing, all the greater for its invisibility.
This article started out solid, but I’m not entirely sure I buy into its premise in the second half. The dissolution of the marketing structure between marketer and marketed strikes me less as a panoptic model of self-regulation through fear of punishment by a system of being discreetly surveilled and more a system of reform argued by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Much has been written about the Panoptic model of the internet and social media, and I would add that the tendency of students, scholars, job-seekers, and others to carefully self-edit their online presence specifically out of fear of punishment, i.e. losing their job, not receiving funding, not obtaining that scholarship/fellowship, or not receiving that job, is precisely what Foucault described in Discipline and Punish.
Just ask any job seeker, grant seeker, or any other applicant who saw a stack of printouts from their Facebook, blogs, or websites land in front of them at an interview committee how radically they altered their online presence afterward. They self-edit, self-regulate, and carefully conform to the “modes of normality” prescribed by, if nothing else, the perceived standards of those believed to be scrutinizing them.
(Source: azspot)
