Self-Discipline on the Web

I now have to reconsider the statement on my Facebook profile, “I like cookies.” I think there is a panoptical aspect to the structure and organization of the web and web communities but also a disciplinary aspect. I think Fernback makes the pantoptical characteristics of web “communities” pretty clear: “Clearly, we can be enticed by the convenience of online shopping and by the social needs of community to participate in our own surveillance”(12). Perhaps the ultimate goal for the panoptic gaze is to create a desire or at least a willingness in the objct/subject to self-monitor and self-discipline. How does this translate to Fernback’s reading of online communities as panopticism? Preferences for fashion, music, and other cultural artifacts aren’t just self-policed within such online “communities” as MySpace, what’s more, that is the primary structure and goal of myspace – to have a community in which the primary activity is self-policing through having one’s identity being represented as the totality of their cultural accumulation, or at least the portion they are willing to show others.

This representation of self “as stuff” reflects the shift from Rheingold’s characterization of online communities as a place where one’s physical appearance becomes irrelevant due to inaccessibility (8) to the current aesthetic, in which images, supposedly the aggregate of which comes to represent the person, abound. Perhaps it was inevitable (although those arguments are always dangerous) or perhaps capital managed to create the imperative of representation of self “as stuff,” but either way there has been a marked shift from Rheinhold’s “transmitters of ideas and feeling beings” to the very carnal vessels he saw as beneficially absent.