Picture this: You're having a nice meal with your friends, squeezing in your morning caffeine kick, or connecting with the world around you on a nice stroll. The group of people behind you, deep in conversation, is speaking just loud enough for your gossipy little spidey senses to pick up a word or two. Riveted, you continue to listen, maybe raising your eyebrows at your companion across the table so they fall silent and you can get the real 411 on the deepest and darkest secrets of unassuming Becky sitting behind you.
Being the righteous, internet–era white knight that you are, once Becky leaves, you're whipping TikTok out and airing out Becky's business. "If you live near this coffee shop and your name is Sabrina and you're going on vacation with a blonde girl named Becky next week with white Nikes, she really doesn't want to go because she thinks you're rude and annoying," or something along those lines—in the name of truthfulness. Thank you! Thank you. You've saved the day.
Once upon a time, even the most perilous of sneaky eavesdroppers could only do so much harm. Maybe they would whisper along a Telephone–style chain of gossip what they had heard, but, really, whatever happened in your friendly neighborhood Coffee Bean would stay, more or less, in your friendly neighborhood Coffee Bean. You could debrief, bemoan, and vent your little heart out in peace.
Now … well. Picture this. You're Becky. You've had a bad week and are fighting with your friend. When you go to coffee with your sister, you find yourself telling her everything that's been bothering you over the past few weeks. You feel better after talking it out with her and go about your day with a little weight off your chest. Next thing you know, you've got a million texts, tags, and a seething friend. Suddenly, we're in Salem instead of Coffee Bean. You are Becky the church girl who was too good at skipping rocks, instead of Becky perched up at Coffee Bean, whose sneaky neighbors have once again turned vicious.
In 2023, you're not getting burned at the stake, but you might go viral with anonymous commenters chiming in and forwarding posts to let people know what they're really dealing with when they're dealing with Becky from Coffee Bean.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of information: three principles by which we live our lives in the nosiest epoch in world history. Maybe not nosiest, per se; after all, nosiness is age–old. But now, we find ourselves in a strangely position, free of boundaries, each with an all–seeing eye in our pockets which tacitly encourages the erosion of privacy. The parasocial paradigm has gone berserk! We know a little too much about everyone, and, just as importantly, we feel connected to perfect strangers.
For decades, paparazzi have been hounding every typically private aspect of distant celebrities' lives, and gossip columns have reigned supreme. We've seen time and time again the toll this constant surveillance has taken on the people whose shoulders it falls upon, from Britney Spears' shaved head to the tragic death of Princess Diana in an automotive accident where she was scrambling from the paparazzi.
Michel Foucault's panoptical surveillance theory is one of the most recognizable sociological paradigms of the last century. The concept of the panopticon, derived from the Greek word panoptes, for all–seeing, is originally that of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham and his brother derived a scheme for a circular prison with a central watchtower, somewhat of a bullseye design. Prisoners, whose cells make up the walls of the hollow circle of the prison, are theoretically in a constant state of surveillance by a single security guard who is, critically, invisible to the prisoners: They don't know, at any time, if the guard is watching or not. Thus, the building is designed to contain a self–reinforcing system of control in which the prisoners begin to internalize authority's invisible, omniscient eye.
While Bentham conceptualized the physical manifestation of a panopticon, French philosopher Michel Foucault expanded the panopticon. Foucault's panopticon is a metaphor that represents a society in which its participants are in a constant state of vigilance, with social norms taking the place of prison rules. Ultimately, the subjects inside—despite the lack of tangible authority or visible guards—begin to self–surveil and act according to the rules in their private lives. We've come of age in a wave of reality TV shows policing participants' private lives to the most minute detail for all the world to see, a social media peanut gallery chiming in at every turn of the lives and choices of not just celebrities (whose every move are often chronicled by accounts like DeuxMoi, which draws off the observations of its two million followers) but regular people as well, with apps like Sidechat and YikYak, where we all take part in each other's constant surveillance.
The interesting thing about the panopticon is that, theoretically, there could be nobody in the tower itself; as long as the prisoners are conditioned to the threat of punishment, the central tower itself serves as enough of an incentive to behave. We carry our guard towers in our pockets, and in our viewing and participatory pleasure of being in on the joke of someone doing or saying something "punishable," keep ourselves accountable and constantly answer to some strange invisible overseer. Sometimes these videos do pick up on unsavory things (boyfriends caught chatting about cheating comes immediately to mind), but to be completely honest, in our pecking–party bloodlust, we seem to have lost perspective of our individuality and that of others in this insane, dopamine–dispensing web of praise and punishment.
A gossip web is nothing new and nothing to realistically bemoan. In the second season finale of Gossip Girl, in which the ubiquitous blogger promises to reveal herself by meeting protagonist Serena at a bar, Gossip Girl herself sends out a blast about the friend group to the entire school—who constantly sent in tips and enacted punishments towards each other in response to the blog's salacious postings. Gossip Girl forces the teens to come to terms with the fact that they were their own system of surveillance and punishment–their own worst enemy, so to speak. Such is the world we live in, where once–whispered conversations go global in the blink of an eye.
Social media has the uncanny ability to stimulate an artificial feeling of closeness among those with whom we share the digital space, and the self–sufficient surveillance infrastructure we've created brings each other's voices and influences even closer. Your followers and fellow screenagers are not just voices you're hearing from the outside anymore. We've internalized each other's gazes and commentary to the extent that we now feel obligated to answer for it and to extend our commentary on others in situations where it is absolutely not our place.
Cancel culture's main defense is that people need to take accountability, and the social media mob is the most efficacious approach to take in this regard. But honestly, who do we really need to be accountable for and answerable to? At the end of the day, Becky talking about her friend in Coffee Bean impacts (at most) the few people involved; there's no need for a million and one sets of vulturous eyes looking to nuke every aspect of her character. There's a huge difference between an individual's lapse of judgment or immature conversation—which, let's face it, we've all had, especially in the process of growing up—and the kind of folly that deserves this kind of attention and backlash. Becky is not a public figure. Becky owes us nothing and doesn't need to be your sounding board to trauma dump the last failed friendship you had, thank you very much.
We see these wildly mundane situations play out on social media and manage to at once distance ourselves from them, insisting we'd never find ourselves in Becky's position because we would never do something like that or insert our opinions (often ones that are colored by our own past experiences). If you found yourself on the other side of a different Becky's harsh words, it makes sense that you'd have an opinion on Becky's actions—but the social media sniping has tacitly given us all entreé into situations that aren't ours to deal with.
It's time to face the music and realize that some of the issues we have with situations like this that blow up are our issues, not those of some random girl across the country who you now have the lowdown and so–called moral leg up on. If three things in this life are certain, it's death, taxes, and the fact that there will be another Becky around the corner at another Coffee Bean, talking about another situation. Such is life.
Life is life, the internet is the internet, and despite the inextricable melding of the last few decades, not everything in life needs to be seen by the world. Ultimately, it begs the question: What aspects of internet culture do we engage with, and how do we interact with this massive global network that has found its way into even the most intimate, vulnerable aspects of our lives—our personal relationships?
Let's pack it up and move along, ladies and gents. All the world may feel like a stage, with invisible eyes peeking out of Foucaultian guard towers everywhere, but it's up to us whether the show must go on.
