Blog 1 - The Power of Social Networking

In an interview with Michael Bess (1980), French philosopher Michel Foucault said that “power is a set of relations... It takes place when there is a relation between two free subjects, and this relation is unbalanced, so that one can act upon the other, and the other is acted upon, or allows himself to be acted upon.” This definition can be further developed to include three different types of relationships (as demonstrated in the Dr. Seuss story of the Sneetches shown in Dr Petray’s lecture in week 2): dominate-submissive, which is characterised by fear; competitive, in which the people are motivated by envy; and co-operative, which involves an almost-but-not-quite equal balance of power (because, as Foucault says in Bess (1980), "the relation of power is an inequality"). But does this theory hold true in the intricate world of cyber networking?

The virtual network that I have chosen to study over the coming five weeks is the widely popular Facebook, which I have been a member of for almost five years. I find that Facebook has the potential to give power to all of its members equally, due to the level of control that is given to the members. I can choose who I add or accept as a friend and who I ignore, what I write in my status and which photos I upload to put me in the best possible light for my ‘friends’ to see. I can even choose to create a fake profile to hide my true identity and leave anonymous comments wherever and whenever I see fit. Everyone has this opportunity, which means everyone has equal power over each other on Facebook. Just like Santa, who ‘knows when you've been bad or good,’ our ‘friends’ can see everything that goes up on our Facebook page. And we can see them. This is why many people, including Turkle (1995), have likened the Internet to the institutional building called the Panopticon, designed by Jeremy Bentham.

I believe that power on Facebook is co-operative. It is virtually equally distributed to all its members, so that no person has the opportunity to act upon another due to an imbalance of power.

References

Petray, T. (2013). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the Making of Place, Lecture 2: Power. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from: http://learnjcu.edu.au 

Bess, M. (1980, November 10). An Interview with Michel Foucault. The Daily Californian. Retrieved from: http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/ michaelbess/Foucault%20Interview

Turkle, S. (1995). Panopticon, in Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet (pp. 246-249). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Image Credits

Facebook Profile Picture [Image] (2011). Retrieved from: http://blog.cheetahdeals.com/2011/07/the-importance-of-profile-pictures/