Power is something that affects us every day of our lives no
matter who or what we are or where we come from. In week two lecture power was
described as “ it has to do with whatever decisions men make about arrangements
under which they live, and about the events which make up the history of their
times in so far as decisions are made the problem of who is involved in making
them is the basic problem of power” (Mills 1958).
The virtual network I decided to participate in over the
next couple of weeks was twitter. Twitter allows people to have a certain
amount of power with the unlimited amount of followers they can have and the
information they choose to share amongst these followers. I am of the opinion that twitter can be
useful if you want to follow what people say that you know and remain in
contact with them but I am not fond of the notion of everyone knowing or seeing what you’re
saying with regards to everyday life.
It
seems today people have less privacy as each day goes past with the amount of social
networks these days. This was evident in the Privacy and UK Phone Hacking
Scandal in 2011. There was an article
written by Benjamin Radford about the scandal at the time it described how several movie stars and people from
ordinary life had their phones illegally searched by one of Britain’s most
former popular tabloids. This makes me think that the social networks that are
available on the internet are not that much different from Sherry Turtles
(1995) discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s
device the Panopticon which enabled
prison guards to always be able to see what the prisoners were up to at any
given time. With these social networks people can be watching you at any given
time without you knowing about it just like the Panopticon.
Reference List
WRIGHT MILLS, J.
(1958). THE CAUSES OF WORLD WAR THREE. New
York: Simon 8c Schuster.
BENJAMIN RADFORD. (Jul
7, 2011). NEWS DISCOVERY. Retrieved from http://news.discovery.com/human/privacy-and-the-uk-phone-hacking-scandal-110707.htm
TURLKE, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age
of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hi Luke,
ReplyDeleteI haven’t had much personal experience with Twitter, but I do know that the lack of privacy that you’ve found there is also true on Facebook, which is a social network that I’m a member of. I totally agree with your statement that social networks are allowing us to be watched at any given time without us knowing, like the Panopticon building that Turkle (1995) mentioned. However I don’t believe that this is at all disempowering. Members of social networks like Twitter have a choice of what information they put up for their followers to see, so I believe that the power actually rests with them. My followers are only able to see what I want them to see, which means they can only know the version of me that I let them know.