Interpersonal Surveillance

“The Matrix is a world pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

“What truth?”

“You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born in bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch – a prison for your mind.”

The preceding dialogue between Neo and Morpheus reveals a dream world created from an ominous idea that reduces humans to a power source that fuels processors. Neuromancer by William Gibson inspired the sci-fi dystopia The Matrix and led the way for the cyberpunk movement. The digital representation of “the real” is indistinguishable from the genuine and shakes its head towards the dangers of an enslaved and exploited race through simulation. This “consensual hallucination” among humans is an idea we continue to revisit as technological advancements well beyond their time frame come to fruition. Surveillance continues to warry society as seen through examples such as CEO Shou Zi’s ByteDance’s congressional hearing over TikTok’s data shares (2023) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s contempt of Congress over Meta’s censorship (2023). Rethinking visibility has always been a governmental affair that brings into fruition the ongoing dialogue about interpersonal surveillance.

Interpersonal social media surveillance renders users visible to one another in a way that warrants a care for the virtual self (Whitson & Haggerty, 2018). Our digital-based replicas of self were originally created to explore a virtual world that seeps across the fine line into reality which paradoxically skews it. To an extent, we are able to experience a scene, in which our present self is not actually located. Through our eyes and our ears, we involve ourselves in a “presence”. Internet voyeurism, regardless of the sexual sensation it produces, invites you into the thrill of being an uninvited guest as privacy lives in an age where it is uploaded voluntarily. This need to spy on others has been part of human interaction since its inception. This tendency has not only become normalized due to the technological advancements in the age of information but also through the shamelessness in which we do it. Secret accounts disguised as bots, having your friends view stories for you, configuring a thesis based on a certain mutual. In our increasingly disconnected lives, we are much more fascinated by mundane updates to indulge in an illusion of intimacy.

New wave visibility gives space for adapted everyday interactions that closely resemble the intersection of observation and control. This targeted collection of information profiles and organizes relationships asynchronously and suggests its normalization. Online comfortability compels its users to seek exposure and increases our reliance on surveillance, shaping how we perceive and how we interact. Monitoring not only fuels the gaze between you and others but also you into your sense of self. We introduce self-scrutiny and we reconsider what we portray and knowingly project someone far from ourselves. We begin to create an embodiment of our greatest achievements that highlight the inadequacy of our lives and appearances.

This mediation of social life is pervasive and should be personally interrogated when managing an online presence. The convenience of its connectivity is what fuels “negative” habits such as “stalking”. These experiences should raise questions of purpose and reconsideration of publicity when regarding the care for our virtual self. Going even further, there should be an investigation into the benefits of a virtual self and our ways of seeing. The lens that we use produces an artificial reality much like the Matrix and this “prison” in our mind continues its conquering so long as we continue to subject ourselves into this axis of visibility and privacy.

xoxo, Trinity Duong