Participatory Panopticon

In recent years, social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and more recently, Twitter have become incredibly popular. Although attracting a fair degree of concern from parents groups and the right wing press over the ease with which paedophiles and other such undesirable characters can make contact with children, the sites are immensely popular with millions of people.

On the surface of it Facebook, Bebo and MySpace all allow their users to keep in touch with old acquaintances and share photos of nights out or holidays with their friends. In reality of course, these social networking sites are part of what Jamais Cascio would call the "Participatory Panopticon".

Everything we do or say is recorded on the internet, our thoughts and activities are posted online in status updates or in photo galleries on Facebook. Of course, these thoughts and experiences no longer belong to us once we post them online, as changes in terms of service mean that they would become the property of the owners of Facebook.

Everything we say or do now is up on the internet in a matter of minutes, indeed the latest social networking site, endorsed by celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Director David Lynch; Twitter describes itself thusly:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Of course, I am as guilty as anyone else of participating in such forms of self-monitoring, this site and our 30 minute films, are on some level, fulfilling a role in the participatory panopticon.
Cascio describes it as "the personal data of multiple individuals [...] synthesized into a collective whole." This could easily be describing our 30 minute projects, constructed from the footage of a class of 12 to make one "collective whole"; the city of Aberdeen.

It seems that the Participatory Panopticon is something that is here to stay, Facebook is still popular despite the recent controversies over the ownership of users images and information and new sites like Twitter continue to play a role in our lives. Video sharing sites like YouTube are also still going strong, with the recent Susan Boyle story a good example. A 3 minute audition on a UK Saturday night talent show becomes a global sensation because it is uploaded online where in the past it wouldn't make the news outside of the United Kingdom. And with such things generating great interest all over the world and subsequently earning the site owners large amounts of money from advertising, it looks like things won't be changing any time soon.