Social media surveillance is symmetrical, making watchers desire being watched themselves

Evidence

Social surveillance is the process by which social technologies like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter let users gather social information about their friends and acquaintances. As Christina Nippert-Eng writes, “Humans are constantly scanning, constantly receptive to and looking for whatever they can perceive about each other, for whatever is put out there.” Eavesdropping is a very human action, and people are resourceful at combining information from disparate sources to create a “bigger picture” of social activities. This picture is augmented by information provided on social media sites like Twitter or Flickr. Social media has a dual nature whereby information is both consumed and produced, which creates a symmetrical model of surveillance in which watchers expect, and desire, to be watched themselves. The presence of the networked audience not only enables connection, it encourages performances of intimacy and conflict to elicit reactions from others. Social media creates a context in which people are constantly monitoring themselves against the expectations of others—a context that can provoke anxiety and paranoia. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 571

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘social surveillance’ precisely — a core concept of the field that broadens surveillance beyond state power to peer-to-peer observation.
• XREF: Links to Foucault’s panopticon and the idea of self-policing; also connects to Social Control of Impersonal Trust’s theme of monitoring in the reader’s prior library. — connects to: Mutual surveillance becomes the habitat within which social conformity is engineered — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1365; Digital surveillance works because people voluntarily expose themselves — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 32; Facebook-era surveillance makes people voluntarily survey themselves unlike Foucault’s uncertain panopticon — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2256
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the symmetrical desire-to-be-watched generalize, or is it specific to social-media-native cohorts?

Broader Connections

• Mutual surveillance becomes the habitat within which social conformity is engineered #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1365