In general, the system is geared toward maximizing user engagement and will present what it deems to be the most interesting content in the hope that the user will be more likely to “take actions” ( Juan and Hua, 2012). The anticipatory logic inherent in the functioning of these algorithms is not primarily geared towards confirming some pre-existing cultural logic but, rather, toward a mode of government that has the capacity to take into account the probability of subjects’ actions. After all, “the predictions could then be used to encourage more user interaction” (Juan and Hua, 2012: 2). By looking at the ways in which the specificities of the Facebook platform, exemplified here through the Facebook algorithm, enables and constrains ways of becoming visible online, we can begin to rethink regimes of visibility that hinge on and operate through algorithmic architectures. In doing so, in this chapter I expand on Foucault’s idea of “panopticism” as it provides a useful and still highly relevant analytic for understanding the ways in which visibility is technologically structured.
Rethinking Regimes of Visibility
Algorithms establish new conditions through which visibility is constructed online. Social media sites are designed—computational spaces that determine how people socialize and communicate. As we have seen thus far in the book, the sociotechnical assemblage of which algorithms are part produce the conditions though which data are put into forms of meaningfulness, that is, determining what will appear on the screens of our digital devices. To understand how the distribution of the sensible happens and with what possible efects, the question is how visibility comes into being—through what mechanisms, logics, and practices of governance.
PANOPTICISM
Foucault operates with two basic notions of how things are made visible or shown, exemplified in his notion of the spectacle and surveillance. It is not just a mater of what is seen in a given historical context, but what can be seen and how the realm of the seeable and sayable is constructed in order to make a particular regime of visibility appear. As sociologist John Thompson explains, whereas the spectacle designates a regime of visibility in which a small number of subjects are made visible to many, surveillance mechanisms from the 16th century onward are connected to the emergence of disciplinary societies in which the visibility of the many is assured by a small number of subjects (2005: 39). Surveillance as a mode of visibility was famously exemplified in the architectural arrangement of the Panopticon.
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