Digitized trivia aggregates into surveillable portraits that drive self-monitoring anxiety

Evidence

In this chapter, I want to demonstrate how the process of “digital instantiation” likewise works toward quantification, qualification, and publicity by rendering users’ lives in piecemeal fashion, unintentionally creating a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Social media tools digitize formerly ephemeral pieces of information, like what one had for breakfast, making it possible to create a bigger picture of a person or community’s actions. Once “breakfast” is captured in a Foursquare check-in or Instagram photo, it can be combined, searched, or aggregated with other pieces of information to create mental models of actions, beliefs, and activities. Within this context, social surveillance, or the monitoring of friends’ and peers’ digital information, becomes normal. While there are plenty of affective benefits to lifestreaming, there are also costs. Lifestreamers must see themselves through the gaze of others, altering their behavior as needed to maintain their desired self-presentation. This constant monitoring against the backdrop of a networked audience creates anxiety and encourages jockeying for status, even as it brings forth new forms of social information. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 528

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage offers a working definition of ‘digital instantiation’ and ‘social surveillance’ as foundational field vocabulary.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that aggregating trivial pieces (breakfast) into a composite portrait creates pressure to self-monitor and jockey for status is a dense observational insight about how platforms convert banality into surveillance.
• XREF: connects to: Aggregated digital traces reveal more than individuals intend and prompt greater self-editing — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 638; Machines can treat everyday digital traces as psychological test items — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2375; Ongoing audience surveillance generates anxiety in online performers — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 511 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Aggregated digital traces reveal more than individuals intend and prompt greater self-editing #corroborates (0.90) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 638
• Machines can treat everyday digital traces as psychological test items #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2375
• Self-branding normalizes surveillance and produces strategic, edited selves #corroborates (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 721
• Ongoing audience surveillance generates anxiety in online performers #corroborates (0.72) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 511