Wednesday, May 27, 2015

What Communities Don't Succumb to Foucault's "Means of Corrective Training?"

I just read Stephanie Gonzalez Guittar and Shannon K. Carter's paper Disciplining the Ethical Couponer: A Foucauldian Analysis of Online Interactions, and I got to thinking about Foucault's Panopticon presented in this online couponing community. Then I started to wonder: are there sites that don't fall into this self-policing type of interaction within members?

Certainly mainstream social media networks fall to this quite obviously. Facebook is, at least on my own feed, a cesspool of conflicting opinions where the comments turn into a bigotted hate-fest, and people try to "win" arguments by shaming the other until they quit replying. In this way, the one with the loudest mouth gets higher on the social heirarchy. And on top of that, it has been shown that your feed effectively polices you to abide by your own political positions due to its reflexive nature where it prefers you to view things that are in agreement with your past likes and posts. But what about other sites?

Most widespread forums fall to this as well. Reddit, for example, has a history on its most popular subreddits of downvoting to obvilion comments and posts that are in general disagreement with the majority of users within that subreddit, and upvoting posts that are in agreement.

What about sports sites? NHL.com has a large commenter-base on its most popular posts. Looking at one of them for an upcoming game, the comments here are consist of one person saying that his team will win, and a reply that goes against this, then one that goes against that...etc. Does this count as a Panopticon of sorts? One could argue that there are competing Panopticons--one attempting to wrest the general mood of the comment section from the other about which team is superior. Despite this competition, however, it seems that negative comments in general are not "liked" as much as positive reenforcement comments, so in a way that is a self-policing aspect.

The only way I could see a website not turning into a Panopticon is for a website to be a free for all, with no voting system, and replies that are only critically discussing the nature of the submitted content--and then, the dissenting, non-critical comments would not be allowed to be discluded, less the site turn into a positively policed discussion.

I'm not sure if this is a solution, but the point of this work is to try to show that, in online communities, it is not really valid to ask if a Foucauldian Analysis is possible, but simply how it is in effect.

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