Watching You Watch Me!! (…on Facebook)

The Web 2.0 application FACEBOOK analysed through FOUCAULTS PHILOSOPHIES ON SOCIETY.

WARNING|DANGER: With this knowledge a consciousness is created with which people become aware about the possibilities of people watching/observing/monitoring people, both virtually as in the real world.

Theory: FOUCAULT

Michel Foucault described an obvious change in society where individuals are increasingly formed into an object of knowledge, and governments regulate populations through the use of “Bio-politics” and “Bio-power”. Foucault describes the notion of these terms as “a set of materials, elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge”(Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1977). He sees the increasing documentation of individuals as a form of this power, which serves the purpose of chronicling past and present tendencies and essentializing them to the individual, in the service of predicting future tendencies (Humphreys, The consumer as Foucauldian object of knowledge, 2006). By noting this change in society he uses Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon model, which is a prison design that allows an ‘omnipresent’ observer to observe all prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched or not, as a metaphor for society. In short, individuals are increasingly being documented and thus turned into objects of knowledge, with a panoptic society in which these objects of knowledge are potentially under constant observation, as a consequence.

An Easy Way to Meet Hot Chicks…Using ‘Tagged’

Lot’s of research has been done on “new” digital environments, also known as Social Network Sites (SNS), which enable people to display themselves publicly through the use of personal profile space. Danah Boyd, a well respected researcher on this defines these sites as:

Web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

Scholars from a variety of disciplinary fields have examined Social Network Sites in order to understand the practices, implications, culture, and meaning of the sites, as well as the users’ engagement with them. One thing is sure and instantly noticed from whichever angle or disciplinary field you look at the sites. SNS’s have a very promising feature for everyone who uses the software; that is the ease to search for, find and meet other people. Whether searching for a friend or a complete stranger, SNS’s enable individuals to locate others online. Whether looking for old classmates, people who share interests or just simply searching for hot chicks, these digital environments make it possible in an easy and sometime fun way.

Twitter, The Aphorism & Semantic Analysis

Twitter
What are you doing?

Twitter allows us to broadcast (“Tweet”) the answer to this question for the rest of the world to view. Using 140 characters or less, twitter users can communicate their thoughts, ideas, links to external web pages or just any type of message or any form of textual expression to a global audience. This form of “microblogging” has increased in popularity dramatically since its release in october 2006. Thanks to its ease of use and its ‘addicting’ factor, countless users in a wide variety of countries use twitter to generate an ever increasing amount of information on thoughts, opinions and occupations, creating a fluid network of information exchange in real-time. Because of these properties twitter holds the ingredients to be(come) a reliable platform for doing research stretched across multiple disciplinary fields. In this blog post i’ll discuss certain approaches for doing research on microblogging and aspects associated with microblogging.