Good Data: An Optimist's Guide to Our Digital Future by Sam Gilbert

Author:Sam Gilbert [Gilbert, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Computers, Data Science, General, Internet, Social Science, Popular Culture, Technology Studies, Computerized Home & Entertainment, Database Administration & Management
ISBN: 9781787396357
Google: 0zgpEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Welbeck
Published: 2021-04-01T20:48:44+00:00

Is Facebook a Panopticon?

What do critics of Facebook mean when they claim that it’s a Panopticon? Most straightforwardly, it means that everything we do on Facebook is visible. It’s obvious that posting a status update or liking an article shared by a friend is visible – that’s the point of doing it. It is somewhat less obvious that the activities we might prefer to keep to ourselves – like tracking down the profile page of a new colleague or looking at an ex-partner’s photos – are also in some sense visible. They are not visible to other Facebook users, but they are logged in Facebook’s databases and visible to its algorithms, and there is a possibility that they might be looked at in encoded form by a Facebook engineer in the course of their work. Integration with other websites makes some of our online activity elsewhere on the web visible to Facebook in the same technical sense – its algorithm can ‘see’ that you browsed that mattress but never placed an order, for instance. Now, it isn’t true that everything in Facebook’s network is visible – encrypted messages on Messenger and WhatsApp can only be seen by the sender and the recipient – but if you think it’s meaningful to talk about algorithms ‘seeing’, it makes sense to talk about Facebook being panoptic, with a small “p”.

However, a Panopticon is a prison as well as an observatory. To say that Facebook is – in the words of Newsweek – an ‘online panopticon’ is to say that its users are prisoners, and that a form of authority is exerting control over them. Control in the Panopticon involves the physical constraint of cell walls, but its defining characteristic is self-discipline produced by the prisoners’ awareness of constant surveillance. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell brought this idea vividly to life through the all-seeing figure of Big Brother. Conceived in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the context of Stalin’s totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, Orwell’s version of the Panopticon is electronic rather than architectural. A network of CCTV cameras in homes, workplaces and public spaces gives the state’s security services total visibility of its population:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.

Surveillance-driven self-discipline makes dissent and resistance to the state impossible. Not even writing a journal can be concealed, never mind political organising. Although the hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, can leave his flat, go to the office, visit an antique shop and take a daytrip to the countryside, he is still effectively a prisoner because he knows Big Brother is watching.

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