In 2013, Graeme Turner wrote a groundbreaking book, Understanding Celebrity, on the evolving role of celebrities in culture/media landscapes.
Think back to that era: Facebook was not yet 10 years old, YouTube only 8, X (formerly known as Twitter - will that "tagline" ever become irrelevant?), Instagram a mere 3, and TikTok was but a twinkle in Zhang Yiming's eye (to be birthed upon the world and it's 1 billion worldwide users in 2016). Contemporary influencers and YouTubers like Alfie Deyes, Zoella, Tanya Burr, and PewDiePie became all the rage in 2009, followed by the 2006 debut of "Payperpost", the first website to pay bloggers to post on brands.
Turner's prescience articulated the extent to which social media platforms catapulted previously unknown, to-be-discovered, or celebs who already had traction into a new dimension accessible via their online "brand presence". Celebs morphed into content producers, controlling their image(s) and audience consumption with virtuosic discipline, instigating and manipulating the production of their memes, videos, posts, tweets, and online musings into a specific persona and driving marketplace demand for more (Purvis, 2006).
Ten years ago, Turner's insights were novel given the relative newness of social media as an articulated advertising "arm" for celeb brands and personas. In 2023, "Social Media" (capital S and M intentional - it's a commodified marketplace, an amalgamation of smaller businesses) continues to dazzle us with its constant accessibility, regurgitated freshness, and panopticon-like (think Bentham's 1791 argument that power and authority should be made visible and transparent at all time) qualities of peering into the (carefully curated) "real lives" of the (sometimes) rich and (certainly) famous. As Foucault countered, however, this constant surveillance is a form of imprisonment: under relentless scrutiny, humans are socially controlled, manipulated, and "disciplined" by an all-knowing shadowy authority. Could it be that social media platforms - and streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney + - are "floors" in Bentham's panopticon, registering and reacting to what we post, watch, comment on, rail against, and disclose online, in a "network of collective expectations"? (Foucault, 1975).
What does this have to do with the Kardashians? The popular television family is an established brand with keen staying power (15 years with 20 seasons alone for Keeping up with the Kardashians) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/style/kardashians-ending-takeaways.html and multi-brand empire (catapulting youngest Kardashian-Jenner, Kylie, into status as the youngest-ever self-made billionaire, and Kim's SKIMS shapewear collection is valued at $1.6 billion with Kim being one of the top global influencers today). The K clan have somehow managed to turn the panopticon into a pleasurable viewing tower. We are all invited in to see how each sibling and mama dowager Kris Kardashian literally run the show, from businesses to acting roles (did you catch Kim on AHS Season 12 Delicate? She's actually got some acting chops to be lauded - props to her), to travel adventures/family trips, to clearing up nasty rumors, gossip, and innuendos about relationships (is Khloe with Tristan or not?), baby daddies, public breakups, and Kim's social justice efforts to free innocent incarcerated individuals.
A lot has been written lamenting about the Kardashians being "trapped" in their own surveillance bubble: the relentless public scrutiny, the revelations of every aspect of the family's life, laid bare for all us to see. I'd like to turn that idea on its head and suggest that we consumers are concurrently in our own panopticon and have "elected" celebrities that dominate these spaces to BE our disciplinary agents.
Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age – bodies that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to constantly observe and record the bodies they control and ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation.
Is it possible our social media/streaming platforms have become a sort of disciplinary institution, and that the programmatic content we see in television shows like The Kardashians allow for a subtle form of observation and discipline to simultaneously occur?
The Kardashians invite us into their very inviting cage by opening up the tower and cells and letting us think we know who they are - and we graciously agree to continue supporting that charade because we benefit from living in the virtual panopticon and are content with accepting the Kardashians hold the power. This is predicated on the idea about what I'm calling "networked power" Fruhling (2021) puts forth:
"Those who generate knowledge can do so, and are accepted, only because they have many overlapping forms of power. Similarly, those who wield power of any form—political, social, economic, academic, etc,—do so only because of of the underlying cultural views about knowledge, truth, politics, human nature, education, etc. that allow those individuals to obtain those many forms of power in the first place."
What does all of this signal for media production, consumption, consumer "surveillance" in the media landscape, and our free will? Because yes, this does ideologically become a question of free will in regard to what we as consumers digest and reproduce, what media companies represent or discard, how we collectively think as a social body about who holds the power, who is the central repository of knowledge, who is the prisoner and the guard in the panopticon. We have unprecedented access to information at our fingertips: thousands of digital snippets that flow our way daily. Is that content and our consumption of it actually "free"? Or are we willingly trapping ourselves in a panopticon of our own making, making celebrities like the Kardashians our wardens, as we watch, post, comment, tweet, blog...?
Purvis, T. (2006). 8 PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF MEDIA AND CULTURE. In Get Set for Media and Cultural Studies (pp. 90-98). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748626472-009
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