In the third chapter of Discipline And Punish: The Birth Of The Prison, “Panopticism”, Foucault explains the power structure the Panopticon establishes. The surveillance prisoners can be constantly exposed to makes them question the appropriateness of their behavior until the absolutely appropriate becomes their model of behavior. In the Panopticon, windows and the transparency they induce are crucial for maintaining the feeling of constant surveillance. That is why the Panopticon is the perfect system for controlling the masses. The notions of seeing and being seen are separated there. Prisoners cannot return the gaze to the observers – that is why they feel powerless. The obvious difference between the Panopticon and Second Life is that Second Life is not a prison – participation in it is voluntary. Second Life makes surveillance possible by using windows and transparency, but it is always possible to know who is observing us and observe that person in return. That is why the clear power relation established in the Panopticon is complicated in Second Life. I will try to test whether, despite different power relations and different structure that Second Life has, it can still manage to function similarly to the Panopticon, that is to discipline and control behavior of its users.
The physical light that causes transparency of prisoners' actions in the Panopticon is present as one of the founding principles of Second Life. Presence in Second Life is always “transparent” - the users can always be found and seen. The difference in the types of transparency is that, in Second Life, all participants use avatars instead of their real identities. What is observed then is not a person directly, but the person's alternate identity. The notion of alternate identity can both facilitate and complicate Foucault's argument about transparency. On one hand, we can never be certain that we are observing anything even similar to reality in Second Life. On the other hand, people often create alternate identities to reveal aspects of their personalities they would otherwise be hesitant to reveal. One could argue that, even in the real Panopticon, prisoners do not have to reveal their true characters. Theoretically, we can meet someone with a “fake” identity both in virtual and common reality. Windows enable surveillance and create transparency, but vulnerability of a person depends on the extent to which that person reveals her or his true self. Power, though, can be exhibited regardless of whether an identity is “real” because power tries to enforce the socially acceptable. The end product of the Panopticon is not likely to be a “natural” person, but a person whose behavior is dictated by the current notion of the appropriate.
The question is – can Second Life exhibit power over the users even though the users do not feel powerless like prisoners in the Panopticon due to different structure of Second Life? There is an aspect of surveillance that Foucault does not discuss as much (because it is not as relevant for the Panopticon) and that is the importance of the observed person’s real identity. When people create avatars in Second Life and do not connect them to the avatars of the people they know in real life, they are not very likely to care what is socially acceptable and what is not. No one knows who they are so they may use their avatars to explore types of behavior they were always afraid to explore. However, once they connect to the avatars of the people they actually know, they are much less likely to experiment with inappropriate behavior because they know they can be seen and judged by someone they might care about.
Because of that, Second Life cannot be compared to one big Panopticon. Instead, Second Life becomes space for creations of many different “Panopticons”. Particularly, every social group functions as a “Panopticon”. Every social group formulates certain modes of acceptable behavior and members of those social groups are very likely to comply to the rules that the group sets simply because they know that what they do can always be accessible to the group. Once we understand Second Life as a space where multiple Panopticons are created, Foucault's theory makes more sense. Surveillance becomes a disciplinary mode only when a window reveals us to someone we care about or want to impress. The power structure in Second Life changes because of our ability to see who is observing us and our ability to do the same, but Second Life still possesses a “power relation” to its users. Its power is exhibited not all in one place, but separately in every social group because in the groups where identities are revealed the transparency causes vulnerability and restricts the behavior to socially acceptable. Within their social groups people can be disciplined to do what is socially acceptable in order not to be expelled from their groups.
Danah Boyd, in Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role Of Networked Publics In Teenage Social Life, argues that the web sites for social interaction teach people social skills they are later able to apply in the real world. Such web sites enable us to interact with more people than we could interact with physically and the more interaction we have, the more we learn what is socially acceptable. Hence, the “panopticistic” nature of Second Life and the type of power it possess can “install” in our minds, by the use of windows, the feeling of transparency. In order not to make ourselves too vulnerable, we comply the rules our “Panopticon” sets. In that way, our “Panopticons” discipline us. As Foucault explains, they are perfect prisons – there is no physical entrapment – there are just windows that expose us to the gazes we do not want to let down.
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