Panopticism is not enough: Social media as technologies of voluntary servitude

Abstract

This article aims to integrate the existing theoretical framework for about thinking the power relations between individuals and sociotechnical systems in social media. In the first section, the authors show how Panopticism found breeding ground in social media studies. Yet they claim that, despite an expanding critical literature, not much seems to be changing in prosumers’ practices online. Their hypothesis is that this is happening not only because individuals are forced or cheated by the sociotechnical systems, as it has been usually argued, but also because they voluntarily submit to them. For this reason, in the second section, the authors introduce the notion of voluntary servitude, coined by Étienne de la Boétie in the 16th century. Voluntary servitude is a paradoxical notion because it represents the attempt of tidying up two opposite facts: human beings’ free will and their reiterated submission. In the third section, they make the notion operative in the context of social media by focusing on privacy as the counter-discourse of surveillance. In conclusion, the authors deal with the emancipatory character of voluntary servitude, as well as with the concept of subjectivity it entails.