Watching and Being Watched

The idea of the panopticon is exceedingly applicable in understanding the Internet and the relationship that the Internet has with our culture. A panopticon establishes social order because people are not positive whether or not they are being watched. In order to prevent embarrassment or reprimanding, people behave in the desired manner. As a society, we contemporarily view the Internet as a place of freedom, a place where we are not being watched. This, however, is not really the truth. More and more we, as a society, have helped the Internet evolve into a place where we are constantly being watched.
Early in the mass consumption of the Internet, many remember experiences of using screen names as our identity. There was nothing that necessarily identified that screen name to an offline identity. More commonly, however, we have evolved into creating an online identity that mirrors our actual self in some manner. Facebook, for example, uses a person’s actual name. Twitter allows for screen names but often has a person’s actual name below the screen name. As a group, we enjoy being able to identify the real life person behind the screen name. We encourage this sort of behavior. There can be many reasons, perhaps we just prefer to have a way to construct a reality of ourselves as we see fit. However, it does create an easy way for companies (especially social networking companies where we freely deliver information about ourselves) to watch us. This is the modern panopticon, we are being watched because we want to be watched.