Social Media, Identity, and the Shift from Disciplinary to Control Societies
This lecture explores how social media serves as a platform for forming identities, navigating privacy, and establishing control over personal information. Key questions include: Who has access to our information? What do they do with it? How does this shape our engagement in cyber-cultural spaces? The session is described as a dense, theoretical study of subjectivity and identity, intended to foster complex thinking prior to detailed breakdown in tutorials.
Subjectivity refers to the philosophical concept of who a person is as a subject (the "I" or the "me"), rather than the colloquial definition of bias as opposed to objectivity. Theories of identity oscillate between the notion of a "cohesive individual" (a singular, unified self) and "fragmented subjectivities" (multiple, diverse versions of the self). The "identity problem" emerged in early social media due to these fragmented notions of identity, which clashed with commercial and accountability needs.
Sherry Turkle is a highly influential theorist of internet and online interactions who has written on online engagement since before the widespread availability of the internet. Turkle argues that individuals perform multiple identities and roles depending on the context, such as being a student, employee, friend, son, daughter, brother, or sister. These roles overlap but do not necessarily cohere into one central self. For example, a person’s workplace identity is often more strictly self-policed than their identity around friends. Turkle posits that online personas, including those using aliases or pseudonyms, are legitimate performances of identity, just as real as offline roles.
Postmodernism rejects the modernist assumption of a singular, true identity, viewing identity instead as context-dependent, fragmented, partial, and fluid. Within social media, there is a strong "discourse of authenticity" where being perceived as genuine is a prize for influencers and brands. Reductive framing of authenticity often relies on a static, fixed notion of identity, which theorists argue is problematic. A valuable student resource is Alan Taylor’s "Authenticity as Performativity on Social Media," which provides a sophisticated account of these debates.
The early internet, including precursors such as bulletin boards, MUDs, MOOs, and Usenet, celebrated anonymity and experimentation, decoupling identity from the physical body. Sean Parker, the Facebook founder, discussed the "Identity Problem" in a 2010 interview. The Identity Problem pertains to the challenge of connecting a person's real life to their virtual life. Social media companies viewed fragmented subjectivities as a commercial problem because they decreased user accountability and made it difficult for advertisers to track and market to users. Facebook addressed this by requiring a single profile linked to a real name, initially enforced by requiring university-specific emails (which offered only one email per student), ensuring a one-to-one link between real-world and virtual identity.
Michel Foucault is a French post-structuralist theorist active from the 1960s through the 1980s. He described two periods of power: Sovereign Society, where absolute power is invested in a monarch or dictator, and Disciplinary Society, which is based on institutional surveillance and the construction of norms. In a sovereign society, crime is a challenge to authority, met with a spectacle of power (e.g., public torture); here, subjects lack agency. In contrast, a disciplinary society aims to create self-normalizing subjects who internalize societal logic. The Panopticon is a metaphor for disciplinary society based on Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century prison design, which allows subjects to assume they are being watched at all times due to unidirectional visibility. Foucault emphasized that surveillance is not just top-down (state/police) but also horizontal, involving peer surveillance where ordinary people judge and respond to micro-deviations from norms.
The three mechanisms of discipline include:
Surveillance: Constant monitoring of subjects.
Normalizing Judgment: Establishments of societal norms where deviators are ostracized or punished.
Examination: Systems that check if subjects perform within accepted norms, like graduations, loans, or promotions. An example illustrating these mechanisms is a boy wearing a dress to school, facing surveillance (stares), normalizing judgment (bullying/ostracization), and institutional examination (teacher intervention/dress code enforcement).
In disciplinary societies, the individual is a unit of practice, taught to align behavior with societal values. Social media captures the individual by requiring demographic identifiers such as age, gender, location, sexual orientation, religion, and interests. Gilles Deleuze, who built on Foucault’s work, argued that we are shifting from disciplinary societies to "Societies of Control." In control societies, people are viewed not as whole individuals but as collections of data, or data clouds, characterized by markers such as student numbers, Tax File Numbers (TFN), medicare numbers, search histories, credit histories, and purchasing data (e.g., Flybuys).
Control societies manage large masses through data instead of human judgment—mechanical checkpoints (e.g., passwords or algorithms checking tax returns) represent thresholds where a dividual’s data is scrutinized. Economic innovation in social media arises from breaking users down into data sets to be mined and sold. Key revenue streams include targeted advertising, user data licensing (from third-party mining), and API access fees (for other apps accessing user data). Notably, Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain sums this sentiment by stating, "When something online is free, you're not the customer, you're the product." In conclusion, modern social media utilizes the performance of the "individual" on the frontend while fundamentally treating the user as a "dividual" on the backend for profit.