SECURING THE SOCIAL: FOUCAULT AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

The essay looks at social media platforms, and in particular digital social networks, in the light of Michel Foucault's description of what he called 'mechanisms of security', that is mechanisms of power emerging in the late 18th century which were concerned with series of possible events, with calculation of costs, and optimization around a bandwidth of the acceptable which should not be exceeded. In particular, mechanisms of security involve the spatial correlate of the 'milieu' which needs to be regulated in such a way as to ensure circulation. The essay foregrounds the important shift entailed by the application of mechanisms of security such as characteristic of network technologies to 'civil society' as a correlate of the market in the formation of liberal governmentality. By giving civil society the technical form of the social network, social media platforms assume the role of regulating and securing the interplay of 'disinterested and partial interests' of civil society and 'economic interests', bringing together economic and social regulation. In particular, the essay explores the functioning of Facebook's OpenGraph Protocol as an example of the integration of knowledges developed by the social sciences in ways that make social network sites responsible for securing the social as milieu of circulation..