It’s weird. The simple fact of being watched and told what you can say. And the possibility that what you’re saying is being edited and what you’re hearing is edited too.

This strikes me as abhorrent. But most of the people here call it necessary, preferable and even desirable.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
      14·
      1 day ago

      No. It’s a prison.

      Moderated social media is not a prison. Lemmy does not make your financial history public. It does not make your whatsapp, telegram or signal messages public. It does not point a camera at your physical body for all to view at all times.

      A panopticon is a prison model where surveillance is possible at all times, and nothing is private.

      Moderated social media, is not a prison, and is not mutually exclusive with 100% private conversation outside any given platform, between any two individuals, or within any given group of individuals.

      The reason PUBLIC forums need to be moderated is that otherwise they devolve instead of develop conversation.

      In the private sphere, the equivalent action taken to mediate conversation is the ability for you to simply stop conversing with a given individual, or for a group to ostracize individuals that sabotage discourse.

      Once you reach a group of large enough size, ostracizing no longer works, and you individually blocking someone does not prevent them from derailing topics for everyone else.

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
          6·
          1 day ago

          Right. Then I’ll just open up your banking history here on lemmy…

          Oh wait.

          And words have meaning. You can’t just point to their etymology and claim they can be used to refer to everything you consider slightly related.

          The fact is, the word panopticon has very specific meaning, and specifically refers to prisons. And you didn’t even get it right. The original concept doesn’t involve constant surveillance, but the possibility of constant surveillance.

          Otherwise every single room with someone wearing sunglasses in it, would be one, because you can’t tell whether that person might be looking at you at any given moment.

          • NigahigaYT@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            1 day ago

            FWIW the Panopticon has been used metaphorically before.

            From Wikipedia (I’d recommend reading the whole Criticisms and use as Metaphor section):

            In the mid-1970s, the panopticon was brought to the wider attention by the French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller and the French philosopher Michel Foucault.[30] In 1975, Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. He argued that the disciplinary society had emerged in the 18th century and that discipline are techniques for assuring the ordering of human complexities, with the ultimate aim of docility and utility in the system.[31] Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins of clinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology

            • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
              3·
              23 hours ago

              Fair.

              It does make for a much more compelling allegory for society, as much like prison, it’s really hard to “exit” society.

              While opting out of moderated social media is not difficult at all.