This fella on the right is Michel Foucault. He was a prominent French philosopher, famous for writing the "History of Sexuality" and "Discipline and Punish" (among other works). I recently read "Discipline and Punish" in a class I'm taking on the History and Theory of Punishment. While the novel focuses primarily on the prison system, Foucault spends a great deal of time talking about the reorganization of society as a whole—After all, our punishment systems are just a reflection of society at large. There are two concepts from this that I think could directly be applied to our lives in the New Media. The first is the intensification of the disciplines, and the second is the concept of the Panopticon.
The disciplines involve distribution in space, organization in time, the ability to assemble, and the creation of standards and norms. Foucault attributes their creation to military and monastic organization, but eventually illustrates how they evolved over time to include schools, hospitals, and prisons. Basically, every aspect of society came to be dominated by the disciplines.
This in turn created dossiers of individuals, records of their lives and their standing against the group. Today we call these disciplines GPAs and Driving Records. Or, more broadly, we could include anything that we've ever generated and set out on the web, ever.
Because it's so difficult to delete anything from the ranks of the internets, we are creating larger dossiers that encompass more individual content about ourselves. Content that could be inconsequential, or not. Embarassing, or not. For example, in writing my personal narrative I have been going backwards in time, digging through my livejournal (yup, still have one), facebook, e-mail, and gchats to try and go back to where I was on April 11, 2008. This is great for research, but I'm uncomfortable with it. I hate the idea that my personal life is so easily traced and documented due to my use of the internet, and the dossier of information that has subsequently created.
This brings me to the panoptic principle. Originally, this was an architectural principle, used in the design of prisons. In the center (as seen on the right) sits the guard tower, which would be able to watch over the individual cells, forcing people to correct their behavior. Foucault takes this principle further, arguing that whether or not the tower is occupied does not matter, for people will self correct based on the notion that they are being watched.
This directly applies to the New Media. Creating content for a blog, livejournal, myspace, or facebook page presupposes an audience. Otherwise, it would not be logical to create content online. This audience then forces you to anticipate reaction, which causes you to modify your behavior. Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but it's certainly true for me (that's a screenshot of my lj, btw). What I write in my real journal is very different than anything I would publish on my livejournal, just as my personal photographs are different from the photos I allow to be posted on facebook. I am constantly grooming myself in anticipation of an audience, whether anyone reads what I write or not.
Of course, one can argue that there are people who don't care what others think, and I would agree that they exist. BUT, I would argue that they're the type of person unlikely to being using these social networking tools, because if they didn't care, then why would they have any of it?
As for myself, whether I like it or not, I'm consumed by these disciplines and the panoptic principle.
As for Mr. Foucault, well, I think that if he had lived past 1984, he would agree with me that the discplines have expanded with the advent of the internet and social technology. Of course, he would have said these things in a much more articulate fashion.
Images:
Michel Foucault: http://perroscallejeros.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/michel_foucault.jpg
Panopticon: http://www.uncarved.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/panopticon.gif
Livejournal: Screenshot of my livejournal, taken by myself
