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Final Essay
Digital Discourses and the Panopticon: Normalization in Times of Social Media
Frederick Drusenthal
20.08.23
Theory of Culture SS23
Michaela Frey
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“For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
We live in a world that is guided by social norms, restrictions, and rules. It is hard to imagine
our society without some of those guiding principles that continuously make us a constitutive
and dependent part of a larger social body. In order to sustain those, each time has come up with
its own means of disciplining the people – either through surveillance or penal systems from
public torture to disciplinary institutions. In his 1975-published work Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison, Foucault (1984) argues that since the 18th century, the coercion those
means of control have exerted upon us still is often veiled in our daily thoughts and practices.
Many examples of social culture display underlying principles that promote and normalize
certain behaviors. Foucault (1984, p. 217) considers these to be embedded in the Panopticon's
formal design. This surveillance system creates a feeling of constant observation and evaluation
for those under its watch, which can lead to the social assimilation of certain behaviors.
Social media is a common example of how assimilating power is integrated into our
daily lives (such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and many more). These multimedia
platform services not only offer information and entertainment but also shape our social
behavior and relationships in significant ways. They prove to have the ability to sustainably
change how we communicate and interact with others (Joo & Teng, 2017; Korda & Itani, 2013).
In addition, the advent of social media has undeniably opened a novel avenue for the
establishment of prevailing norms. These possess the capability to significantly shape our
capacity to present and articulate ourselves, whether in the digital realm or in the physical world.
To understand how social media can be a medium to exert assertive power structures on its
users, I will argue that Foucault’s theories of the Panopticon and Normalizing Power offer
valuable insights for examining how social media platforms facilitate extended surveillance,
control, and normalization of individuals, profoundly impacting contemporary society’s
confrontation with power, identity, and homogeneity.
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I.
Foucault’s Panopticon and Digital Disciplinary Potential
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish traces the historical evolution of disciplinary power
through the panopticon, a concept inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s architectural design for a
prison. The panopticon’s central tower allows a single observer to monitor all inmates without
their knowledge, inducing in them a state of self-discipline through the fear of possibly being
scrutinized at all times. This structure thus facilitates social control and obedience within its
institutional settings. Foucault uses the concept of the panopticon as a metaphor to refer to the
mechanisms present in various institutions, such as factories, hospitals, and schools (p. 17). He
suggests that the panopticon is an essential aspect of all modern disciplinary institutions, as it
is “organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests
on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a
certain extent from bottom to top and laterally” (Foucault, 1984, p. 192). These surveilling
mechanisms have severe repercussions on the public and end up “leav[ing] no zone of shade”
(p. 192) as even the ones entrusted with supervising the others from a central point of view can
be constantly viewed. Far apart from applying only in the obvious disciplinary institutions –
such as schools, prisons, factories, etc. – it is all kinds of social spaces that can be possibly
invaded and thus surveilled by the gaze of others. This machinery-like form of surveillance,
thus, constitutes a sphere in which the boundaries of public and private start to blur and behavior
is constantly exerted through a sort of socially normative filter, as I will discuss more thoroughly
later on.
Within the digital age, social media platforms have emerged as powerful entities
employing a digital panopticon model of sorts. An increasing number of daily users voluntarily
participate in their surveilling mechanisms, exchange their personal information, and
communicate behavior online. Algorithmic surveillance and data mining enable social media
companies to gather vast amounts of information, creating virtual panopticons where users’
actions are observed, recorded, and analyzed without their constant awareness (Fuchs, 2012, p.
xix). Therefore, social media companies function as covert surveillance entities, operating from
within their applications without having to reveal their presence to users. Accordingly, they can
exercise – possibly disciplinary – power without facing the same consequences of being seen
as human disciplinary guards in Foucault’s panopticon would. By constructing impersonal and
algorithmically hidden surveilling mechanisms, social media companies have the possibility to
exert veiled power as a central structural feature of their platforms. For example, the Instagram
algorithm constantly considers and analyses a user's content, interests, and behavior on the
platform. This metadata is then used to make the users’ experience “as pleasant as possible”
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(Hirose, 2023, p. 1), prolonging the time and attention devoted to Instagram by offering
optimized personal content and advertisements. Subsequently, it becomes possible for the
companies to achieve refined surveillance of their users based on rather passive and silent
information-gathering, making it possible to observe certain behaviors and predict, reinforce,
and change them.
II.
The Spectacle of Visibility and Self-Presentation
Within this digital panopticon, individuals are engaged in a constant spectacle of selfpresentation. Users often seek validation, popularity, and social capital on social media.
Consequently, they meticulously construct their online personas based on the perceived norms
of their peers. This frequently results in a performative creation of their digital identities, as
users often internalize and adhere to social media norms, effectively disciplining themselves to
fit within the prescribed boundaries of the platforms. Foucault describes this process as the
normalization of behavior. Instead of punishing by atonement or repression, the “perpetual
penalty” that highlights and sanctions socially nonconforming behavior “compares,
differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (p. 195). Although,
again, he relates this explicitly to the power structures embedded in typical disciplinary
institutions of his time and historical studies, similar effects can be observed in the social
dynamics of social media platforms. Behavioral studies by Colliander (2019) and Sunstein
(2019) have demonstrated clearly how the structure of online discourses has amplified
individuals' conformity to opinions, standpoints, and self-presentation. It seems that social
media has amplified the presence of information with specific values in a platform that greatly
influences the course of contemporary public discourse. Whenever one encounters the
narratives and ideals of content on social media platforms, it can bias their perception of the
subject matter as it can “introduce, through this “value-giving” measure, the constraint of a
conformity that must be achieved” (Foucault, 1984, p. 195).
It is interesting to note that this conformity to a norm also leads to the conscious
formation of more unique identities online. Individual users can compare themselves on a wider
scale through social media engagement and see how they differ from the perceived norm.
Foucault notes that “within a system of formal equality, […], the norm introduces, as a useful
imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences” (p. 197).
Social media companies utilize this shading of individual differences to support personalized
content, allowing users to differentiate themselves from others on the platform. Like this, the
individualization of their presence is tied to the assimilation to more fragmented norms and
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consumption patterns. The utilization of normalizing power on social media is therefore
enhanced by the fact that it affects individuals on a highly personalized level. This process is
further amplified by the bubbled social media discourses, as I will discuss more thoroughly
later on. Although this is a process not unique to social media – the concept has been wellestablished in social psychology and is now supported by research in neuroscience (Morgan &
Laland, 2012b) – it does reach new amplitudes of potential instrumentalization of those effects
for the purpose of profit.
Most social media platforms are driven by an attention economy, where the
commodification of users’ attention is a lucrative source of revenue. The constant exposition to
notifications, likes, and comments exerts the platforms’ disciplinary mechanisms on their users.
By conditioning the user to seek approval for their social media identity, the algorithms
perpetuate their presence and engagement on the platform, which increases the profit of the
companies behind the platforms. Foucault grasped it well when he argued that “by means of
such surveillance, disciplinary power became an “integrated” system, linked from the inside to
the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practiced” (p. 192). The
spectacle of visibility and self-presentation has given social media platforms an incredible
potential to commodify each user's personality by means of normalizing power.
III.
Contemporary Dynamics and Outlook
As users of social media platforms often unconsciously submit personal information and
intimate details of their lives, the boundaries between the public and the private become blurred.
Many have now evolved into platforms where showcasing privacy has become the norm for
achieving worldwide recognition, popularity, and accomplishment. A frequently occurring
example is the emergence of influencers on social media, who are users that gain fame by
showcasing large parts of their personal lives publicly and are paid by companies to promote
and potentially influence people's consumption habits by means of their publicity (Goméz,
2019). As previously discussed, many social media users tend to adopt the behavior they come
across online, leading them to conform to as well as reproduce the normalizing power exerted
digitally by those influencers and other digital actors. The loss of privacy leads to heightened
user vulnerability, making individual consumers susceptible to manipulation and control by
external actors, including governments and corporations. As Bradshaw & Howard (2017) have
pointed out, a lot of those powerful external actors have used their resources to manipulate
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masses of people online, making use of the filter-bubble effect1 to advance their own agendas
(p. 15-16). The reason for the erosion of privacy is the high level of sophistication in social
media algorithms that relentlessly monitor and customize content based on users' interests and
actions in real-time.
Conclusions
In conclusion, it becomes evident that the contemporary dynamics of social media usage and
its implications for social life are vast. Through the omnipresence of the manifold digital
platforms and their refined means of surveillance and control, it can be argued that they have
established a digital form of Michel Foucault’s panopticon. Further, this essay has aimed at
demonstrating how the digital panopticon and its normalizing power surpass previous forms of
disciplinary institutions in their potential for conscious instrumentalization and how this
redefines the user’s confrontation with power structures, identity, and homogeneity. Recent
research has shown that the algorithms and economic interests behind the platforms companies
as well as the powerful actors who contribute to the discourse on them, continuously advance
in exercising their coercive means to advance their agendas and foster their revenues. Foucault’s
theories seem to be a useful tool in order to conceptualize the adaptability and refinement of
disciplinary technology in the age of social media.
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The filter-bubble effect describes how social media users are targeted and categorized by certain interest
groups and therefore only see news and contents confirming their previously held assumptions and views. For
more, see: Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. Penguin Press HC.
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Citations (APA 7):
Bradshaw, S., & Howard, P. (2017). Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of
Organized Social Media Manipulation. In Computational Propaganda Research
Project. (pp. 1–37). Oxford Internet Institute.
Colliander, J. (2019). “This is fake news”: Investigating the role of conformity to other users’
views when commenting on and spreading disinformation in social media. Computers
in Human Behavior, 97, 202– 215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.03.032
Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books. Vintage.
Fuchs, C. (2012). Internet and surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media.
Gómez, A. R. (2019). Digital Fame and Fortune in the age of Social Media: A Classification
of social media influencers. aDResearch: Revista Internacional de Investigación en
Comunicación, (19), 8-29.
Hirose, A. (2023). 2023 Instagram Algorithm Solved: How to get your content seen. Social
Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagramalgorithm/
Joo, T. M., & Teng, C. E. (2017). Impact of Social Media (Facebook) on Human
Communication and Relationships: A View on Behavioral Change and Social
Unity. International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology, 7(4).
Korda, H., & Itani, Z. (2013). Harnessing social media for health promotion and behavior
change. Health promotion practice, 14(1), 15-23.
Morgan, T. J. H., & Laland, K. N. (2012b). The biological bases of conformity. Frontiers in
Neuroscience, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2012.00087
Sunstein, C. (2019). Conformity: The Power of Social Influences. New York, USA: New
York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479896585.001.0001