Final Project Excerpt #3

Social media has created a loss of privacy because all eyes are on the users. If a person posts a picture, it is on the Internet forever. In conjunction, nearly anyone can search for this individual and see this picture. This idea of  loss of privacy being more beneficial for social media companies is demonstrated in the novel The Circle. The protagonist, Mae, works for a company called The Circle which has taken over the lives of those in the society. As The Circle works to destroy privacy, after a while Mae begins to have Thoreau-esque moments of wanting privacy and rebelling. Consequently, she is labeled a threat to The Circle, and this leads to her public confession in front of a crowd of people. Eventually, her interrogator convinces her that her thoughts of wanting privacy are wrong. Mae conjures this saying, “Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, [and] privacy is theft” which will later be used by The Circle (Eggers). This idea of all information being shared is right and information being withheld is wrong in a social media setting is reflected by big social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Although reality’s social media companies do not openly advocate for a loss of privacy like The Circle, users posting more information benefits them monetarily. Therefore, these companies have created features like paid advertising and a ‘suggested’ newsfeed to keep users wrapped up. The more people post, the more information they release allowing the company to receive more money from directed advertising (pairing up advertisements based on the ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ of each person). This also coincides with a loss of privacy because individuals release more information on themselves to their peers and to companies that are advertising. Ultimately, social media companies creating a realm of “sharing as much information as possible keeps you connected with others” is not necessarily in the users’ best interest, the companies just make more money.

How does social media control its users? According to Foucault, the main effect of the Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was “to arrange things [so] that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” (201). This idea of constant surveillance is executed in social media because everyone knows they are being watched, but social media companies make it impossible to figure out when or by whom. According to River Jordan, in his essay titled Social Media: The Most Effective Panoptic Method, “Secretly, dealing with social media, there are systems monitoring individual’s every move by tracking every website they visit, hence computerized history” (2). In addition to being watched on social media by peers or people one does not know, they are also being watched by the social media companies themselves. As stated before, social media companies use a person’s ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ to allow advertising from smaller companies to target a specific audience. This allows for a larger influx of money to the social media company, whether it be Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and encourages other companies to advertise to make money as well.