Social Media and the Universal Omniopticon

 

Art by Banksy

It has become clear to me that the Golden Days of freelance blogging are now pretty well over. First they came for Y360, then they came for Multiply and now they have dispersed the communities that grew up around them. I say freelance blogging has come to this watershed because the Blogosphere itself is full of corporarate blogs and 'professional' bloggers with channels in the corporate media who now abound in cyberspace.
The social networking element of blogging, here on Blogger at least - has it seems been effectively dismantled as is befitting a service that is run as part of the Google/CIA empire. This social media now takes place primarilly on Facebook and Twitter rather than on blogging sites where all sorts of views, topics and theories appear in a huge discourse involving perhaps millions of people. The educational elements of the blogosphere remains intact for the timebeing... but the social connectedness that these once fostered have largely been severed, or so it seems to me at least as a Blogger poster.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a matter for dispute I suppose. Social networking involves all sorts of 'passions' that are not seen as often in the serious blogosphere as typified by Blogger than on the more interactive social networking sites. The absence (or at least the significant diminishing) of these sorts of interactions are not missed much by me... except that they often made me laugh...literally - LOL - by the developing banter and the heartfelt feelings that underlie the comments that have appeared on the screen.

People enter into deep relationships on the net, they fall in and out of love, they argue passionately with each other, they rant and threaten, they coax and seduce and they run the entire gamut of human emotions all created by little marks on a screen, characters assembled deep in the psyche of some anonymous typist in some possibly distant location...somewhere around the world.
Friendships form and bonds are created based entirely on the organisation of 26 characters (in English) digitally flung into cyberspace, some like cupids arrows aimed at a particular heart (with "official" eyes and ears in the meantime playing 'gooseberry' and logging the call)...others are a statement posted for the world to see - if anyone can be bothered to look or give a fig about the topic in the first place, we can set out our personal manifesto if we choose in the blogosphere.
Social networking can cause feeling of elation or depression, excitement or fear, of support or intimidation, they can fulfill our wishes or bring only disappointments. What we type is what we are and that is why Google collects all our data to inform the corporate globalist elite of what we want, whether we can afford it, how we see the world and how we may want to change it.
Depending on how these feelings, thoughts, drives and motivators are interpreted determines whether you are assigned to the category 'threat' or 'soft touch' , whether we are labelled gay or straight... or something else on the spectrum and generally what floats our boat in public and in private... although digital technology has now abolished the concept of privacy altogether. Scopophilia on the taxes.... like airport security scanners that 'undress' us we fear for the purient interests of the operator rather than the security of the flight.
This sort of voyeurism actually characterises the corporate surveillance state and those who work for it perfectly. The revolution in social control has been fully achieved in the past decade or so. A paranoid view might be that our 'memes' are being constantly monitored and modified by the technology we use, it would be an error in my view to assume that we control it or that we ever actually could.

Effectively it seems the internet has turned the world into a gigantic Panopticon of the sort first visualised by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) the founder of modern utilitaraianism.

According to Wikipedia a Panopticon was a prison based upon Bentham's concept that:-
 "the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behavior constantly." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

This notion of self-surveillance is important to supporters of the panopticon theory of contremporary social control and opinion forming. The same principle applies to the widely trumped PRISM programme that has the US government's National Security Agency (NSA) through GCHQ in the UK, Google on a global scale and countless other means of spying on us all... because in theory of course they can, so they do.

The secret services not only want to see our papers nowadays they want to know everything we think and every network we belong to. The corporate person that the US military/industrial complex is - is unfortunately a mentally disordered one, paranoid and deluded...its a meme that everyone else is now watching - who isn't actually watching us. Here we introduce a countervailing theory namely that of synopticon or the many watching the few. Perhaps we are living in more of a omniopticon where everyone is watching everyone else....but the few have never been watched as closely before.

It could be easily argued that if you want to create a digital panopticon  you must first of all spread the idea that such a principle is indeed possible and that is where people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange come in I think. Whether your 'cell' is being observed or not, the Panopticon principle has been deliberately disseminated to try to intimidate dissenters into believing they may be targetted by this costly high tech state apparatus so they had better not bother ...ha fat chance!

I'm not the first to notice the similarity between Bentham's panopticon and the postmodern corporate globalist virtual state of the sort we have to put up with at least until the mission is completed.

Post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 book on the French and more generally western penal systems Discipline and Punish described the panopticon-isation of society thus..."on the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social 'quarantine', to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism' ......
It is a paradox that the revelations of Edward Snowden and of Wikleaks have raised concerns about an all invasive panopticon surveillance state when in themselves they are actually evidence of the opposite...that is a synoptic or even omnioptic cultural mileiu in which the surveillance is not all one-way and not all corporate or governmental either.

It is a pity that the social elements of blogging have diminished it seems, unless you choose to use mainstream social media to communicate with the world, but it is no reason to stop posting. I think we should take the surveillance state oversight with a pinch of salt. Who knows what the person in the next cell is doing while the domestic spies watch us and we watch them back. It may be important because acts of terror and crimes of all sorts still take place, people still access forbidden internet content and the likes of Mr Snowden and Mr Assange remain media celebrities and the latest antiheroes of the digital age. My message is stay calm and carry on - nobody is reading this stuff anyway.