Is there an ethical implication of social media? In the first quarter of 2021, Facebook reported 3.51 billion users and Instagram 1.386 billion users in july (Statista, July 21, 2021). So nearly half of the world population uses social media. What if this social impact is misused? The recent Facebook whistleblowing affair of Frances Haugen challenges the social reputation of social media once again (Horwitz, 2021).

The potencial negative side effects of social media will be analyzed in general by using Foucaults analysis on power structures, asking the question: Is Instagram a panoptic machine? To transfer the concept of the disciplinary to a more recent approach to society Han will be tackled as well. Negative effects of social media on human health are pointed out, using empirical research results. An example of mass manipulation will be exemplified through the case of Cambridge Analytica.

The disciplinary Society: Are we still enacters of panoptic mechanisms?

Foucaults analysis of society uncovers a disciplinary system that evolves power without acting anymore, the system works in the mind of everybody, because everybody knows without knowing: “The heaviness of the “old houses of security”, could be replaced by the simple economic geometry of a “house of certainty […]. (Foucault, 1977, 202-203) Why is it important that there´s certainty within the individuals that are part of the systems that constitute the disciplinary society? Because nobody would follow the rules of a system without the certainty of being visible and that there´ll be a particular consequence, if you act in particular way. So the individual tries to behave right from itself.

Benthams panopticon is the perfect prison (to oppress prisoners: to create the perception of being watched all the time) and Foucaults example for the underlying mechanisms of power within a disciplinary society. It´s a tower that’s centrally placed in the middle of prison cells, that are located around in a circle. So the tower in the middle could overwatch every prison cell. The could is important here, cause the person in the tower can look in every direction, but in fact the person can`t perceive everything and everyone at the same time. The central mechanism of power within this monitoring situation is the invisibility of the watchmen, so the watchmen needs to be anticipated. The prisoners can´t say, if the watchmen is watching. All the prisoner knows, is that one could be watched. From this perspective nobody is needed to overwatch the individual. The possibility is enough to evolve conscious and unconscious thoughts that make the individual enact the system. The tower is as an example of centralized institutions in a differentiated society. Cause the prison is the legitimized power to maintain the executed law and to exclude the not following individual from society. Clinics and clinicians as legitimized entities to diagnose what´s ill or healthy. Schools and universities as centralized institutions for education. Within a disciplinary society everything is territorialized embodied by central institutions of obedience. The power arises from the separation of the individuals. The prisoners are close to each other but they can´t communicate with each other. Everybody is prisoned in it´s cell. Everybody is forced to fulfil it´s societal narrative.

The anticipation of being under continued surveillance is the key of power within the disciplinary society. But being watched without a consequence would make this power relation irrelevant within Foucaults approach of a totally disciplined society. The disciplinary society works through negation, rules empowered by prohibition work through the anticipation of punishment. Negation needs the anticipation of centralized institutions that enact a consequence, if you‘ re not following the rules. As an example the institution school conditions the learning of individuals by grades that differentiate knowledge reproduction in fitting vs. not fitting in the definitional frame. The educational system requires good grades, if you want to have access to higher education. So only individuals who fit in the educational system, will achieve higher positions. If you´ re not following the rules in school, you won’t be able to participate in society. If the individual isn´t following the defined way of our educational system, everybody who´s part of this system - every professional is – would consider your perceptions and judgements as invaluable cause you´re not legitimized. […] it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.” (Foucault, 1977, 202-203) It´s always decided in advance cause the individual within a dichotomous framework of fitting vs. not fitting to the schema, enacts it´s role by accepting the net of society within any acting that’s related to success within the society. The individual doesn´t reflect on it`s position. The institution school as an example of spaces of enclosure: It goes to school, to avoid exclusion. By going to school the individual recreates the power of the educational system by going through it. The individual doesn´t need to be under continuous surveillance anymore, cause the individual surveils itself to be an as good fit to society as possible

It is a “generalizable tool of functioning […]”. (Foucault, 1977, 205) Foucault evolves the idea: The power arises from the fear of death, experiences with plagues like the leper are used as an empowering essence behind mechanisms of exclusion, that are still evident in society (Foucault, 1977, 198 f.). The narrative of a purified community seems possible by confinement of the contaminated. The complexity of world and self-perverted into the narrative of dualistic truth. Authorities, for example Psychiatry, combine two methods in a dualistic mechanism of exclusion (Foucault, 1977, 199). Binary division & branding “mad/ sane vs. normal/ unnormal. The endless complexity of human mind reduced and operationalized in categories and diagnostical systems that brand a person by a defined cut off. Institutions of exclusion individualize the individuals that needs to be excluded by branding it, due to the mechanism of binary division. You are mad or sane is the binary division, that allows institutions to identify and brand the individual that needs to be excluded. “Who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way […]”. (Foucault, 1977, 199) Individual constant surveillance can be replaced by idiosyncratic/ personalized diagnostic that leads to a personalized way of therapy. That’s the actual gold standard in modern psychotherapy.

The digitalization of binary division and branding – the quantifiable self

How does the dualistic mechanism of exclusion persist? To answer this question, it´s necessary to introduce the concept of the control society by Gilles Deleuze, but as Deleuze said in the 90s, we are about to live in a society of control, it wasn´t completely there at this time (Gilles Deleuze on Cinema: What is the Creative Act 1987 [English Subs], 2015). Now it´s 2021, so how much is left of Foucaults analysis on our digitalized world? Sociality reduced and operationalized in a like button on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. United within our axial visibility we check us out, reassure our reciprocal visibility by liking/ commenting (reward) or ignoring/ commenting (punishment) each other. You could ask why no reaction is punishment? It´s because the purpose of social media is to gain attention. Han compares the smartphone with a confessional box[1] and puts it like that in an interview from 2014: “Wir beichten weiter, und zwar freiwillig. Dabei bitten wir nicht um Vergebung, sondern um Aufmerksamkeit.”[2] Always searching for matching consumernarratives, presented by externalized (it determines without being directly visible to the consumer)  algorithms. Because these algorithms really know what you want. An empirical study (N = 86.220) of Cambridge University analyzed how well an algorithm, fed by likes, can predict the personality of users (Youyou et al., 2015). The algorithm needed 10 likes to be more accurate than a collegue, 70 likes to exceed the impression of a friend, 150 likes to overcome the judgement of the parents and 300 likes to make a more accurate prediction of personality than your partner could do.

If the product is free, you are the product (Serra, R. & Weyergraf, C.,1980). The blueprint for political relevant constructed matching narratives provided by social media is the case of Cambridge Analytica. The election of Trump and the Brexit referendum was manipulated by micro targeting users of social media (Graham-Harrison & Cadwalladr, 2020). Algorithms were used to derive user profiles of people who are undecided to give these users the most matching narrative to vote for Trump or the Brexit. A 10 year longitudinal study of the MIT found out, short, emotional and political fake news are by far the most spreading and influential information on Twitter (Study: On Twitter, False News Travels Faster than True Stories, 2018).

The problem that derives from binary division accumulated by digitalized panopticism is evident in the persisting dichotomous ongoing political debates. Participants are stuck in a legitimation loop of: I´m right. I´m enacting the solution! Rather than trying to manage complexity. A question to challenge the narrative of dualistic truth could be: Can you claim green to left liberalism as just good? Even if I try to vote, act, eat, consume in a sustainable way, I don’t do it just right. There´s always blindness and reproduction of dysfunctional power e. g. green materialism/ elitism, that recreates exclusion and poverty. In contrast to the ethical narrative of being right, let´s look at a deeply misled/ manipulated person that votes for the AFD. It´s still a complex human and not just a racist. A person with fears, that is comforted by the presented reduction of complexity or better, negation. But a lot of people who claim to be ethical, social, emphatic voting for green or left parties, reduce the person that votes for the AFD as well and just see an enemy image. Criticizing the usage of enemy images within the politics of the AFD. The narrative of “I am right and you are wrong” is a relic of the disciplined society. A society where everything is structured, so citizens have orientation, as a clear comforting way to follow. I`m good and you`re bad. It´s never that easy, it´s just complicated and nothing leads to more violence than dualistic, dichotomous self- and world relations (aka this is completely true/ good/ right). Not meant in a nihilistic way, just try to be more holistic and be humil in your perceptions/ actions. Foucault has its blind spots too because he isn´t writing about its potential blind spots. As a little excurse Fraser criticizes that he recreates normativity, while claiming to be non-normative: „He assumes, in other words, that these norms can be neatly isolated and excised from the larger cultural and linguistic matrix in which they are situated. He fails to appreciate the degree to which the normative is embedded in and infused throughout the whole of language at every level, and the degree to which, despite himself, his own critique has to make use of modes of description, interpretation, and judgment formed within the modern Western normative tradition.” (Fraser, 1981, p. 284) To be fair, Fraser is a critical theorist, so her narrative can’t exist without normativity. But others share the perception of a socially evoked subject through language. We as persons derive from sociality, to use Lévinas, the self is derived within transitivity, so we are bound to norms, because we communicate within the normative system of language. Social constructivism goes well with the self we are trying to explore here as well, because the self of the 21st century is embedded and enacted in social media.

“It [the disciplining, obedience creating mechanism] is polyvalent in its applications.” (Foucault, 1977, 205) Why shouldn´t it be digitalized? Humans need positive self-validation or they will become depressed and later on even suicidal. From an external perspective on self-worth the amount of positive stimuli determines psychological well-being. Social platforms like Instagram are social reward systems that use our dependency to create an addiction to social reward on an unlimited level. Finally overcoming any limits of sociality, finally overcoming all this human limits. 10 Friends? 20? 30? Digital sociality isn`t limited by room or time. You can gain unlimited visibility. Even if you`re talking in stadium in front of thousands, that’s nothing compared to the reach or attention some influencers on social media have. An influencer enslaves the followers by the illusion of being more perfect or better as the followers, so the image of imperfection in followers is triggered trough the enacted self-image of perfection embodied by influencers. Simultaneously an influencer enacts a self-image, that gains stability trough a narcissistically driven compensation[3] that’s based on the dependency to this kind of unlimited social confirmation. Unlimited social confirmation could be an overcompensation of any type of vulnerability or self-worth threat. There´s empirical research that supports the hypothesis: Narcissistic overcompensation correlates with the usage of social media. Narcissists use their interpersonal relationships to evoke the impression of being socially desirable and strive for external sources of admiration to maintain their self-esteem (Brown & Zeigler-Hill, 2004). Furthermore, narcissists are likely to engage in “weak tie” relationships that do not require emotional investments (Bergman et al., 2011). Carpenter, 2012 found out that narcissistic individuals use social media significantly more and enact antisocial behavior like: Seeking for social support while not supporting others. Halpern et al., 2016 surveyed: Is, if there´s is a causal effect between social media usage and pathological narcissism? In the longitudinal study with N = 314 participants they could proof that people who are narcissistic, post more selfies and that people who use social media become more narcissistic.

Big Data and social media as panoptic machines: axial visibility & lateral invisibility

The panoptic machine is “for dissociating the see/ being seen dyad.” (Foucault, 1977, p. 202) The algorithm learns about you, but you are not on Instagram to learn something about algorithms. Some writers explain, that with social media the Panopticon is “reversed” the tower in the middle is replaced by the user, since “the controlled”, the user is alone in the middle of the prison.  The sociotechnical system enabled by algorithms that reiterate the will of submission within a narrative of self-expression, where the controlled is the controller, controlling and being controlled by the other users. (Romele et al. 2017). The consumers are all around her or him but everybody is a prisoner himself. Sitting in matching prisons created by the AI (artificial Intelligence) but observed by the anticipation of the others watching you while being watched. The company reduces the individual in consumer profiles, in which the individuals consume the onlife infosphere (Floridi, 2018). The panoptic machine “automatizes and disindividualizes power”. Cause the mechanism of digital narrative construction is externalized by an algorithm that´s bound to binary logics of yes or no. The mentioned “principle of power” is less in a person, it’s a set up system/ principle” aka the the commercially used internet expressed through logic machines (Computers) & so called AI, evolves personalized digital realities with matching peers, politics and products. It´s a tool to create narratives.

Enslavement by positivity, the control society

„Der Ausbeutende ist gleichzeitig der Ausgebeutete. Täter und Opfer fallen hier in eins. Die Selbstausbeutung ist effizienter als die Fremdausbeutung, weil sie vom Gefühl der Freiheit begleitet wird. Das Leistungssubjekt unterwirft sich einem freien, selbstgenerierten Zwang.“[4] (Han, 2015 p. 79 f.) Nothing is needed to manipulate you, when your deepest layers of personality - lets call it the illusion of something that we call our personality - is conditioned in the singularity of performance camouflaged as freedom. You are what you achieve. There are no boundaries, because there´s no limitation of achievement within our meritocracy. Bachelor is done? Do your masters. Ohh I get it now, it´s getting easier, there is some space left in my life. I could be more as I am right now. So there´s no inner command, it´s more subtle. It’s the temptation of self-fulfillment. It´s not forced upon you. You want to make it, because you believe in it, because everybody needs something to believe in. Do more. Just do two masters, it´s the possibility of perceiving your self- and world-relation in a more elaborated way. If you get better within your work, there´s a temptation within your free and deeply performance related self: If you can do it, you need to, because there is no other purpose. God is dead. Absolute self–exploitation is transformed into lifelong personal growth. Reward through social platforms reassures this transformation. Everybody shares it´s positivity, so you should be positive, because you live in a positive world[5], accessible with a positive mindset. Accessible through your smartphone in the second you wake up. You are stressed. You should meditate. Ancient teachings exploited to enable more. Yes, this more is nothing specific, because there ´ll be something else when you achieved it. Till you collapse. Brusseau 2020, describes consumers within control society as consume trajectories that never end. “The advertising of trajectories converts experiences into the desire for another, further down the continuous line.” (15-16) Following Brusseau the line goes on because the experiences have been good and advertisement provides something that’s just better. Positivity and improvement reached romantic relations as well. Swiping on after hundreds of matches, cause there´s more, there´s better.

The only limitation is our nature as limited beings, living in a digital world of unlimited information in real time. Han mentions a number of psychological diseases that go with that human limitation within a world of the unlimited need to perform, grow and consume. Depression if you fail. Burnout if you really tried to make the best out of you, to finally overcome – yes what? What do you want to overcome? Does the subject within meritocracy want to overcome itself? Does it finally want to overcome humanity? Becoming a social entrepeneur. Is this our rescue or the source of severe illness? Psychology answers: Every year, almost one third of people in Germany suffer from a mental disorder (Mack et al., 2014). This numbers are without unrecorded cases. A social entrepreneur challenges itself by a war between the best versions of itself. Han, 2016 identifies narcissistic self-reference that leads to a war within the subject, because it needs to be the best version of itself. As Han says, there can´t be a winner within this battle but a burned-out subject. Han also identifies new ways of communication and social media as catalysators, that allows humans to engage in a multiplicity of “weak tie” relations where the other is missing. The digital world offers highly individual narratives that are hardly perturbated by others. (Han, 2016, 74-75). The subject somehow loses that quality, what constitutes us within our transitive self, the other, the perturbator is externalized into quantity of likes. Han describes this subject as trapped within itself, deeply exhausted by maintaining a bright picture of quantity based relationships, without quality relations, that´re deep and challenging connections to others, this person becomes incapable to be in connection. Back to empirical psychology, Lin et al., 2016 surveyed N = 1787 social media consuments in a longitudinal study and observed that persons who used social media extensively, where significantly more likely to develop a depression.

What would Foucault write? That´s the interesting part. You can´t really say, because its theory is claimed as not normative. So there shouldn´t be a direction we can get out of his analysis of the disciplinary power structures, that created the discipline (Psychology) I am using to legitimate my critique empirical. Foucault deconstructs allegedly legitimized entities as power structures, derived from a society where everything got its place. So, universities are legitimized places to produce truth. Moreover, truth is disciplined in clusters. If you want to say something about negative side effects on psychological health of consumers, you need to use the legitimized power structure called psychology, to say something about it (Foucault, 1981). The alleged entity legitimizes itself since the behavioral turn within the discourse into truth by empirical research, enacting the narrative of objectiveness. Truth is the product of institutionally legitimized interpunctions within discourses we can´t escape as part of the society, as part of the scientific realm.  Haraway gots a strong answer to this narrative: “That view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god trick […]” Here she argues against the scientific narrative objective truth, that would need total, inhuman, godlike knowledge. “I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden [...].” (Haraway, 1988) This text needs to quote her, to protect itself, to protect the subjective perspective as something valuable. From the perspective of natural science, you could accuse this text as subjectively contaminated and unscientific. You can’t escape the ongoing discourse of science. The only solution is to use legitimized scientists to legitimize the concept of arguing from the subjective perspective within the picture. Claiming to be objective within these particular situations, cause there`ll always be a blind spot, knowledge is always limited. Harraways concept of “situated knowledge” can be used to switch between introspective reflection, as a consuming enacter within control society and the necessarily subjectively framed metaperspective from above, that necessarily overlooks something within the unlimited complexity too.

Footnotes

[1]Refering to the enlightenment, Nietzsche (2000) said “Gott ist tod!” (god is dead). Economic growth or the narrative of absolute truth provided by empirical science are filling this purpose vacuum for humanity. Cause religion gave us sense, it still does to billions but not the members of our meritocracy. Deleuze and Han call it the control society. Han describes our will to be a transparent person, as an act of sensemaking in a senseless world.

[2]"We continue to confess, and do so voluntarily. In doing so, we do not ask for forgiveness, but for attention."

[3] Narcissism as a personality trait is the ability to maintain self-worth and can be functional or dysfunctional. Dysfunctional narcissism manifests itself in overcompensatory behaviours (Kohut, 1993; Kernberg, 2018). Rhodewalt and Morf (1995) prove, individuals with high scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory-40 (NPI-40) (Raskin & Terry, 1988) are highly sensitive to self-esteem threats. Individuals with narcissism compensate for this perceived threat by exaggerating themselves (grandiosity) and avoiding negative feelings (vulnerability) rather than dealing with them.

[4]“The exploiter is at the same time the exploited. Perpetrator and victim fall into one here. Self-exploitation is more efficient than the exploitation of others because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The subject of performance submits to a free, self-generated compulsion.”

[5]When I tipe in #body into the searchengine of Instagram, it´s notable that there are around 8.8 million posts with the hashtag #bodypositivity. (retrieved at 27.09.21 via Instagram) It´s a countermovement arising, trying to diversify the perfect narratives of success and beauty lived by influencers. It means to show scars, speckrolls or pimples instead of muscles and perfect skin. But if we stay with the numbers and scroll down a little (Instagram shows the mostmatching and popular hashtag first, so #bodypositivity isn´t the most popular hashtag on instagram, if you tipe in #body, it´s just the most popular one for that what´s perceived as me by the algorithm made narrative I am enacting on the platform), it will be #bodybuilding with around 120 million posts.

Author:

Marlon Lüning

Marlon.Luening@uni-wh.de

Works at the chair of Sociology and studies Clinical Psychology (M.Sc) and Ethics & Organisation (M.A).

 

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