As Rajchman points out in his discussion of Foucault: “Architecture helps ‘visualize’ power in other ways than simply manifesting it. It is not simply a mater of what a building shows ‘symbolically’ or ‘semiotically’, but also of what it makes visible about us and within us” (1988: 103). Conceiving of visibility as an organization of power in both a negative and a positive sense, Foucault shows that “spaces are designed to make things seeable, and seeable in a specific way” (Rajchman, 1988). Prisons, hospitals, and social networking sites are essentially spaces of “constructed visibility.” The realm of visibility created by the panoptic architecture did not work primarily through a certain iconography or a visual semiotic regime but, first and foremost, through the technical structuring of a way of being, implementing an awareness or atentiveness to the constant possibility of inspection. To highlight visibility as a system, a diagram, is to highlight the “distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of dispositions of centres and channels of power” (Foucault, 1977: 205). It is precisely this notion of a material or technical structuring of visibility that seems especially interesting and relevant in terms of new media. The spaces designed by the (im)material conditions of the software are similarly designed to make things visible and, thus, knowable in a specific way.
T H R E AT O F I N V IS I B I L I T Y
The mode of visibility at play in Facebook, as exemplified by the news feed algorithm, difers from that of disciplinary societies in one particularly interesting way. The technical architecture of the Panopticon makes sure that the uncertainty felt by the threat of permanent visibility is inscribed in the subject, who subsequently ad justs his/her behavior. While one of the premises of the panoptic diagram pertains to an even distribution of visibility in which each individual is subjected to the same level of possible inspection, the news feed does not treat individuals equally. There is no perceivable centralized inspector who monitors and casts everybody under the same permanent gaze. In Facebook, there is not so much a “threat of visibility” as there is a “threat of invisibility” that seems to govern the actions of its subjects. The problem is not the possibility of constantly being observed but the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not being considered important enough. In order to appear, to become visible, one needs to follow a certain platform logic embedded in the architecture of Facebook.
The threat of invisibility should be understood both literally and symbolically. Whereas the architectural form of the Panopticon installs a regime of visibility whereby “one is totally seen, without ever seeing” (Foucault, 1977: 202), the algorithmic arrangements in Facebook install visibility in a much more unstable fashion: One is never totally seen or particularly deprived of a seeing capacity. As is the case in the Panopticon, the individual Facebook users can be said to occupy equally confined spaces. Like the carefully and equally designed prison cells, user profiles represent templates that “provide fixed positions and permit circulation”
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IF . . . THEN