mrt, Foucault, 11/17

 The Pop Culture Panopticon

After reading the excerpt from Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punishment” for class on Tuesday, I can not stop thinking about the Panopticon. We briefly discussed how the CW’s show “Gossip Girl” served as an interesting example of this, but I almost feel like the influx of social media usage (even just from 2007 when Gossip Girl first aired) has created a real-life social panopticon, especially in celebrity culture. While social media allows the user to choose exactly what version of themself they want to portray on the internet, the average user can log off and escape the image they’ve created. A celebrity can not. While they can log off, they must always exist as the brand they’ve identified themselves with, and with fans and paparazzi lurking on every corner to take pictures and videos (often without the celebrities consent or even knowledge) they become the poor inmate and we all serve as the guard in the central tower, watching their every move.

In our discussion, we also talked about news stories that aren’t essential, and one of my classmates brought up the example of E-news and celebrity lifestyle stories. While I agree they aren’t essential news, I can’t imagine being the celebrity who has every personal detail of their life and relationships plastered all over the internet and serving as the headline for every popular magazine. For us, reading about celebrity lifestyle may serve simply as a guilty pleasure, but that is someone’s actual life and wellbeing. It makes me think of celebrities like Taylor Swift whose names have been dragged through the mud for audience interactions or the Damelio sisters who are both so young but have said they often struggle with even leaving their house for the fear of paparazzi following them everywhere they go. Or Amanda Bynes and Lindsey Lohan whose struggles with addiction were used as clickbait. If these people feel as they must act a certain way (or in Taylor’s case leave the public eye completely for a period of time) because of their constant surveillance by fans and pop culture consumers are we any better than the person in the central watchtower? Are we enforcing a different kind of discipline and power dynamic on these celebrities? I think sometimes it’s hard for people (myself included) to think about how it must feel to have every move you make picked apart by the public because we see all of the privileges and extravagant lifestyles celebrities lead, but in a way, I bet they feel as though they are confined to their cell, the public watching their every move, stuck as a cog in the Panoptic machine.