The Crowdsourced Panopticon: Conformity and Control on Social Media

by Jeremy Weissman Mudd Postdoctoral Fellow, Washington and Lee University

Overview

Behind the omnipresent screens of our laptops and smartphones, a digitally networked public has quickly grown larger than the population of any nation on Earth. On the flipside, in front of the ubiquitous recording devices that saturate our lives, individuals are hyper-exposed through a worldwide online broadcast that encourages the public to watch, judge, rate, and rank people’s lives. The interplay of these two forces - the invisibility of the anonymous crowd and the exposure of the individual before that crowd - is a central focus of this book. Informed by critiques of conformity and mass media by some of the greatest philosophers of the past two centuries, as well as by a wide range of historical and empirical studies, Weissman helps shed light on what may happen when our lives are increasingly broadcast online for everyone all the time, to be judged by the global community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538174098
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/13/2022
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	5.96(w) x 8.97(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Weissman is assistant professor in philosophy at Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I: Conformity

1. The Human Animal in Civilized Society
2. Social Media as an Escape from Freedom
3. Meaninglessness in the Present Age

Part II: Control
4. The Spectacular Power of the Public
5. 'P2P' Surveillance and Control

6. The Net of Noramlization

Part III: Resistance

7. Freedom from the Public Eye

8. Strategies of Resistance
Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

In The Crowdsourced Panopticon, philosopher Jeremy Weissman has taken on one of the most pressing issues affecting contemporary societies: the role of surveillance on social media. As our world becomes increasingly digitised, and more and more of our interactions are mediated through the internet, social media has become an inescapable part of life for billions of people. These technologies exhibit a kind of social power that has never been seen before in history, and Weissman claims that this power has ever growing influence over our behaviour.... The Crowdsourced Panopticon is a welcome addition to the scholarly work on surveillance and privacy, but the clear, approachable writing style and wealth of empirical examples make it just as accessible to non-experts. Weissman has certainly done his part to increase awareness of how social media affects our behaviour, and has laid the foundations for how we might behave in the future.

In The Crowdsourced Panopticon: Conformity and Control on Social Media, philosopher Jeremy Weissman explores social media's potential to endow ordinary people with the power to track, survey, and censor others across the globe. This monograph serves as an excellent resource for professors and teachers looking to connect historical philosophical debates to contemporary debates.

Social media and smart technologies are radically changing the ways humans envision themselves as individuals and in communities. Jeremy Weissman is one of the few who discerns both the exciting possibilities they offer while also recognizing where they may diminish rather than enhance what makes us fully human. This work exemplifies the best kind of ethical and policy analysis of emerging technologies.

The Crowdsourced Panopticon offers a powerful indictment of our culture's toxic exposure.... Weissman's analysis of what he calls the "net of normalization" is rich, helping to show the immense social pressure to conform.

To avoid dystopias you need to know what it takes to create them--how to engineer people to conform to harmful norms and participate in practices that erode freedom and perpetuate injustice. The Crowdsourced Panopticon presents a powerful philosophical warning for resisting the detrimental programmed behavior encouraged on social media and afforded by so-called smart devices.

Jeremy Weissman's chilling account of a future in which digital technology is fully enmeshed in the fabric of society and our human selves is no science fantasy. It is lucidly argued with enormous clarity and imagination. Warnings of this gripping book are informed by classical parables and centuries of philosophical thinking about human aspirations and ethical values combined with a unique grasp of on-the-ground realities of digital life.

From the Publisher

In The Crowdsourced Panopticon, philosopher Jeremy Weissman has taken on one of the most pressing issues affecting contemporary societies: the role of surveillance on social media. As our world becomes increasingly digitised, and more and more of our interactions are mediated through the internet, social media has become an inescapable part of life for billions of people. These technologies exhibit a kind of social power that has never been seen before in history, and Weissman claims that this power has ever growing influence over our behaviour.... The Crowdsourced Panopticon is a welcome addition to the scholarly work on surveillance and privacy, but the clear, approachable writing style and wealth of empirical examples make it just as accessible to non-experts. Weissman has certainly done his part to increase awareness of how social media affects our behaviour, and has laid the foundations for how we might behave in the future.

LSE Review of Books

To avoid dystopias you need to know what it takes to create them—how to engineer people to conform to harmful norms and participate in practices that erode freedom and perpetuate injustice. The Crowdsourced Panopticon presents a powerful philosophical warning for resisting the detrimental programmed behavior encouraged on social media and afforded by so-called smart devices.

Evan Selinger

Jeremy Weissman’s chilling account of a future in which digital technology is fully enmeshed in the fabric of society and our human selves is no science fantasy. It is lucidly argued with enormous clarity and imagination. Warnings of this gripping book are informed by classical parables and centuries of philosophical thinking about human aspirations and ethical values combined with a unique grasp of on-the-ground realities of digital life.

Helen Nissenbaum

Social media and smart technologies are radically changing the ways humans envision themselves as individuals and in communities.  Jeremy Weissman is one of the few who discerns both the exciting possibilities they offer while also recognizing where they may diminish rather than enhance what makes us fully human.  This work exemplifies the best kind of ethical and policy analysis of emerging technologies. 

George Khushf

The Crowdsourced Panopticon offers a powerful indictment of our culture’s toxic exposure.... Weissman’s analysis of what he calls the “net of normalization” is rich, helping to show the immense social pressure to conform.

The New Atlantis

In The Crowdsourced Panopticon: Conformity and Control on Social Media, philosopher Jeremy Weissman explores social media’s potential to endow ordinary people with the power to track, survey, and censor others across the globe. This monograph serves as an excellent resource for professors and teachers looking to connect historical philosophical debates to contemporary debates.

International Journal of Technoethics

This was an informative read all in all. It relied on a mixture of academic sources, philosophers, and modern scholars intermingled with sober perspectives recorded in popular media. The book contained illustrative examples and cases to make it relevant to the reader and accessible, in today’s context, and always with a twist. This is indeed Weissman’s craft—to connect the ancient with the modern, and to convey to us, “we’ve somehow been here before.” We can use these ancient stories to inform our modern-day narrative and to use the learnings from today to ensure we create a better future and not fall into the traps that had been foreseen. Readers are truly spoiled at every turn because this book is an original contribution in the way it weaves and inter weaves the fundamental storyline: our technologies have social implications—do we see what they are doing to us, our community, and society at large [26],[27]?

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine