- Title
- Governing the Facebook self: social network Sites and neoliberal subjects
- Creator
- Owen, Stephen
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- The internet was once celebrated as a place in which anonymity allowed its users to experiment and play with multiple forms of identity. The rise of Social Network Sites (SNS) has altered the ways in which people engage with the internet. Instead of being potentially anonymous users are now likely to be ‘nonymous’ where displays of selfhood are grounded in already-existing relationships that contribute to verifiable, authenticated, unified identities. Furthermore, the spaces in which the self is presented online are highly structured spaces in which users’ behaviours are both constrained and enabled in pre-determined ways. One such space is Facebook, the focus of this thesis. The argument is that Facebook is a space where forms of selfhood align with the dominant logics of neoliberalism. Facebook is used routinely by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Spaces like Facebook are predicated on mutual forms of display. Facebook’s very design constitutes a particular form of social surveillance architecture. These aspects coalesce in such a way that Facebook becomes a site in which its users are, knowingly or unknowingly, engaged in activities that require the government of the self. Within the Facebook space users find their behaviours guided in particular ways. Users themselves engage in processes of self- monitoring and self-regulation. In this way Facebook facilitates the operation of power through its use as a technology of the self in which contemporary Selves are performatively constructed through an ongoing engagement with the site. This thesis applies a Foucauldian-oriented understanding of power and government to the analysis of Facebook use employing concepts of governmentality, panopticism, subjectification, and the power/knowledge nexus. The research data was gathered using a ‘facet’ methodology approach that involved a survey, interviews, and online observation. This combination of approaches enabled the broad attitudes and behaviours of Facebook users’ to be explored and some of the underlying motivations and beliefs to be identified. Online observations of users’ daily engagement revealed both what this particular sample of Facebook users actually ‘do’, and the sorts of Selves that emerge through their everyday behaviours. Ultimately, Facebook is shown to be a social surveillance architecture and part of a discursive formation that supports and reinforces neoliberalism. Facebook’s unique design, the emerging norms of Facebook use, and the proliferation of discursive warnings related to improper usage combine to effect a twofold seduction of its users. In the first place it proffers its users a sense of freedom, while simultaneously leading them to conform to a narrowing range of acceptable behaviours. The sense of freedom is coupled with relationships of power that encourage individualisation and normalisation such that Facebook users should become responsibilised self-governing neoliberal subjects.
- Subject
- Facebook; Foucault; social media; Social Network Sites; surveillance; technology of the self
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1047941
- Identifier
- uon:14849
- Rights
- Copyright 2014 Stephen Owen
- Language
- eng
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