‘It is an attitude’: the normalisation of social screening via profile checking on social media

ABSTRACT

Daily life has been pervaded by surveillance, not only in the ways in which information is gathered about us but also in how we perceive and experience monitoring in our everyday lives. Contemporary surveillance and its normalisation hinge on us actively engaging with, negotiating and sometimes initiating an array of monitoring practices [Lyon (2018). The culture of surveillance: Watching as a way of life. Cambridge: Polity Press.]. In this context, this article examines young people’s understandings and deployment of social media profile checking – that is the practices of covertly looking at someone’s profiles on social media platforms to gather and/or corroborate information about this person. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with young people, the article explores how social media profile checking has become taken for granted, not only encouraging surveillance practices as part of social media interactivity but also producing specific understandings of social screening. Combining insights from Foucault and Bourdieu’s works, the article argues that the normalisation of profile checking needs to be understood as a specific type of practical knowledge of the social world which is embedded in broader neoliberal governmentalities and legitimises a greater social sorting of interpersonal sociality.