Foucault’s architectural model of power usefully highlights the ways in which spaces are “designed to make things seeable, and seeable in a specific” way (Rajchman, 1988). It ofers a useful avenue to analyze algorithms in terms of architectural structuring in which embedded technically means having the power “to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or dificult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable” (Foucault quoted in Deleuze, 2006:59). For a mapping of power, Foucault’s notion of government and governmentality also ofers elaborate concepts for the kinds of architectural shaping that he first described in Discipline and Punish (1977), as it points to the multiple processes, measurements, calculations, and techniques at play in organizing and arranging sociality. Analytically, this implies a focus on the ways in which algorithms arrange and organize things, its specific techniques and procedures, and the mechanisms used in processes of individual and collective individuation.8
I argue in this chapter for the importance of revisiting the idea of the technical and architectural organization of power as proposed in the writings of Foucault, by highlighting an analytics of visibility. Becoming visible, or being granted visibility, is a highly contested game of power in which the media play a crucial role. While Foucault did not connect his theory of visibility specifically to the media, the framework he developed in Discipline and Punish helps illuminate the ways in which the media participate in configuring the visible as oscillating between what can and should be seen and what should not and cannot be seen, between who can and cannot see whom. Examining new modalities of visibility, thus, becomes a question of how and when something is made visible rather than what is made visible, through which specific politics of arrangement, architecture, and designs. Although Foucault’s writings focused more on the “how of power,” I want to suggest that the how is inextricably linked to the when of algorithms as discussed in the previous chapter. If the how of power are “those practices, techniques, and procedures that give it efect” (Townley, 1993: 520), then the when, in this case, refers to the aspects that are rendered important or unimportant to the efectuating of these procedures at diferent times. In this chapter, I investigate the notion of mediated and constructed visibility through a close reading of the news feed and its underlying algorithmic operational logic. I argue that Foucault’s idea of an architecturally-constructed regime of visibility as exemplified in the figure of the Panopticon makes for a useful analytical and conceptual framework for understanding the ways in which the sensible is governed in social networking sites.9 The intention is not so much to ofer a definite account of the role played by Facebook in capturing the world in code but to open avenues for reflection on the new conditions through which visibility is constructed by algorithms online.
Life at the Top
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