In Plato’s Panopticon

Shadows of Identity in a Social Media Cave

This is a revised and updated version of an essay I wrote in 2016.

In Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death he says,

Of course, in television’s presentation of the “news of the day,” we may see the “Now . . . this” mode of discourse in its boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

In this sense, television walked so that TikTok’s algorithm and endless scroll could run, and all sense of seriousness about the world we live in and the urgency of the problems we face is undercut by the absurdity of the endless scroll and the algorithm: we see a video of a Palestinian child murdered during a genocide, then a livestream of a bunch of strangers arguing about whether or not trans people should have rights, then a tarot reading, then protestors in L.A. getting trampled upon by police horses, then a #grwm video, then ICE kidnapping a crying child, then a woman making chili in a toilet bowl, then a clothing haul, then news of the U.S. bombing Iran, then a dance trend, etc. . . .

Social media serves multiple functions, networking and news sharing among them, but its primary role is advertising. This is not only true of corporate accounts, it is inherently true of all accounts: social media is a tool for creating a brand identity, a way of turning ourselves into content to be consumed, a way to consume the lives and lifestyles of others (sometimes literally, such as instances of catfishing and identity theft). Users of social media are encouraged to be as visible as possible, which involves a blurring of the line between private and public identities. User data is sold to corporations which then targets them with personalized advertisements, hailing them as consuming individuals. 

Visibility is a trap.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Susan Sontag’s essay “In Plato’s Cave”, part of a collection of essays published in 1977 entitled On Photography, asks the reader to examine the ways in which the prevalence of photography has acted as a modern Plato’s cave, leading us to a new and deceptive understanding of both personal and global realities. Sontag’s essay is prescient of American¹ society’s current relationship with social media, as well as the exponential growth of photo/videography and data tracking through the ubiquity of smartphones. 

Beyond serving as the Platonian cave of the new millennium, social media’s increasing pervasiveness in our lives has created a new panopticon. Foucault said that the panopticon

“induce[d] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” and a “surveillance” that “is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action”.

Social media seeks to destroy the line separating a user’s private persona/offline reality and public persona/online reality by threatening possible social death if they refuse to participate. Social media is designed to encourage both the sharing and consumption of information and the always-on-hand availability of our phones, the endless scroll, the addictive nature of the algorithm allows them to capture our attention 24/7.

While social media may not always directly or indirectly alter the experiences that a person chooses to have, it often does. Sontag says that the act of taking photographs “gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on”. For our social media audience we pose, filter, tag, edit, compose a caption, record retake after retake, choose the hashtags that will help us go viral, etc. Experience itself is no longer enough; each moment must be shared and validated by an audience as well. As Sontag states, “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation”. In other words, the photograph or the video is the experience as much as the actual event. 

More importantly, we share our thoughts, feelings, and opinions; we influence² and are influenced in turn to buy the same clothes, the same food, the same ideologies; we behave badly and bait others into behaving badly for engagement; we sell the sacred and consume the profane; we spread conformity, ignorance, and division like a virus while calling authenticity, kindness, and empathy “cringe”.

Sontag said that “Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of the family, friends, neighbors”. Sontag was only referring to those photos taken by camera and passed around amongst neighbors, friends, and family at social gatherings. In the age of smartphones and social media, this has been taken to an extreme: In the New York Times article “Photos, Photos Everywhere” they estimated that the number of photos taken in 2017 was expected to reach 1.3 trillion³.

Further, in the age of social media, it is not enough to take photographs, or even enough to share them with a small audience of friends and family; the quest of content creators is engagement and achieving virality via their personal “brand”. Platforms encourage users to share information about themselves but whether users choose to or not, their data will be collected via the algorithm and data tracking. To return to Foucault’s panopticon, the “power” of social media as a means of surveillance is that the audience is both “visible and unverifiable”, as there is no way for the user to “know whether he is being looking at at any one moment”; they are simply sure that someone or anyone might be watching them at any point in time, even if it’s only the algorithm.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.

Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave

Though we know intellectually that photographs can lie, there is a “presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness”. After all, “the picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture” (Sontag). As more people get their news from social media, which is largely unregulated in terms of fact-checking and the management of misinformation and disinformation, and in a landscape littered with filtered photos, AI generated content, and deepfakes, it is sometimes difficult or impossible to tell what is real creating an environment where we are likely to believe and share what is fake and disbelieve the truth.

In January of 2012, Facebook “manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003” users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods” (Hill). This was neither the first nor the last time that Facebook has used its user’s data to perform research (their data policy includes a stipulation that user’s information can be used for research purposes). However, because they are not subject to the same oversight that academic studies require, including approval from an ethics committee, Facebook has “a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people” and little to no liability for any potential negative outcomes of that research (Hill). Inherent in this kind of research are many disturbing implications about the power behind social media and the ways in which it attempts to collapse physical and virtual realities, in this case, by actually altering user emotions through online content.

Another unseen manipulation of the news feed is in its format. For Sontag, there is the problem of the voyeurism, but more, “crushed hopes, youth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are alike – are equalized by the camera. Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events“. Social media presents information in such a way as to be a great equalizer — a feed containing pictures of family dinners, legitimate news stories about current events, conspiracy theories, graduation photos, and cat memes are presented one right after another. Stories are not ranked by importance or legitimacy, but rather by user engagement. 

What is “true” is often lost in a sea of advertising and click bait. There is a plethora of knowledge available on the internet, easily accessible, easily shared. However, right alongside, indistinguishable at times, is “yellow journalism” and celebrity distraction. 

The ability for users to “unfollow” or “unfriend” their online “friends” also alters the way that information is shared. While social media could potentially lead to users expanding their points of view by interacting with an ever increasing social circle, we have become more siloed than ever. The Wall Street Journal began a project in 2016 called “Blue Feed, Red Feed”⁴ that offered “side-by-side looks at real conversations from different perspectives” to show how vastly different the news feeds are of self-described liberals and conservatives. Sontag said of photographs that they “cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one–and can help build a nascent one” and that they make “reality atomic, manageable, and opaque”. The way in which news feeds and profiles are curated has the same effect, enabling users to reinforce their moral positions by closing themselves off from other points of view and finding an ever larger community of other like-minded individuals, further entrenching them in their own positions. 

Sontag said that “by furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution”. The reality that is mirrored back to us on social media is incomplete and shadowy, thus, “humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth” (Sontag). 

1. I specify American only because I do not know if this is the case everywhere. ↩︎
2. It would be more accurate in this case to call it proselytization, propagandizing, or advertising rather than influencing. ↩︎
3. It is estimated that 2.1 trillion photos will be taken in 2025. ↩︎
4. This page has been archived and will no longer be updated as of 2019.
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