On the fateful afternoon of Sept. 26, I was greeted to a surprise upon opening my phone: dozens of texts from various friends, all regarding a photo of me. A few days before, several friends and I decided to, badly, alter our hair and go out into the world dubiously styled as a joke. No, I won’t explain why. It was personal, yet our photo was posted extremely publicly on the official Scripps College Instagram page. Screenshots of it soon plastered my texts.
I was met with an image captioned “#NationalSunsetDay with our students,” featuring my friends and I sporting deep side parts, half grimaces and looking generally disheveled. I was horrified. People told me I looked like “the world’s tallest four year old.”
Pardon my vanity, but it was humiliating to have such a bad photo posted so publicly.
Of course, I’m not alone in this experience. In the digital age, our reality is that we cannot control how we are seen on social media. An unflattering photo is pretty tame. Videos lampooning people doing things marginally out of the norm go viral on social media every single day.
While we might not personally feel comfortable posting others without their consent, many seem to hold fewer qualms against placing judgment and even outrage on these strangers thus victimized. But parallel to these declining social customs, our digital footprint is increasingly important for our futures. Colleges, jobs, potential friends, roommates, love interests and more — these are all opportunities that social media could give us, or take away.
Social media has connected us to what feels like the whole world, at a cost. It allows us to meet people who we would have never met otherwise. It has created communities of all different kinds of people. It pushes us towards interests and ideas we might have never come across, influencing everything from our fashion choices to our political beliefs. However, that constant access has given us too much power. Instead of creating a digital culture where diverse expression is more normalized, social media has simultaneously made us all more judgmental and more aware of judgment others might pass on us.
Gone are the ubiquitous celebrity tabloids and melodramatic soap operas. Now we get our schadenfreude from dissecting the quirks of average people, and to feed the virality machine we encourage this surveillance with likes. Often, people end up victims to the algorithm, going viral after being posted without their consent by a stranger who thought their behavior, or even appearance, were funny enough to share and ridicule.
Because of social media, not only are we more able to observe others, but we are also more aware of our differences in ways both good and bad. Without social media, you were just a weird guy who liked to, say, dress up as a cat or wear all black and listen to sad music. Now you can be connected to a community of people who share similar interests and feel less alone. But if you had never heard of a furry, then the guy on your block who liked to don a tail would have seemed like an oddball. Social media made everyone aware of furries and gave people tools to categorize and ostracize them for their differences.
Because being on social media means that you are much more visible, and vulnerable, subcultures of today appear more surface-level and vapid than the more underground ones of the past. As social media algorithms demand visuals, the focus of these subcultures tends to be aesthetic, not value-based, prioritizing consumption rather than actual rebellion. Our subcultures become a bit more accessible but a lot less interesting.
In his work, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, French philosopher Michel Foucault explores what the feeling of constant observation does to the psyche using a conceptual prison which he called the Panopticon. The prison functions by trapping all of the prisoners in cells that open towards a central guard tower. The prisoners cannot see into the guard tower, so they can never know if they specifically are being observed at any given moment.
Instead, they live under the possibility, and therefore the assumption, that they are constantly being observed. Foucault explains, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power … he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” A prisoner living in the Panopticon becomes his own observer, with no choice but to enforce the expected standards of behavior on himself, or risk being labeled as part of a delinquent class.
In our increasingly surveilled lives, the Panopticon feels more and more like our society. Social media invites us to observe and ultimately traps us in its surveillance. The only difference between Foucault’s Panopticon and Instagram is that there isn’t just a single guard in the guard post. We are all simultaneously both the victim of observation, and the unseen observer.
Our phones are always within arm’s reach, able to label our peer’s behavior as delinquent at a moment’s notice. We have created a cage where the rules and norms are set up by an algorithm that has trained us to expect perfection or performance.
One of the clearest consequences of this observation is Gen Z’s conservative attitude towards sex and dating. Conservatives love to fear-monger about the hookup culture “epidemic,” but Gen Z’s problem when it comes to sex is too much shame and fear.
We are the most sexually puritanical generation in decades: Less than 30 percent of Gen Z have reported ever having had sexual intercourse, a 17 percent drop from about ten years earlier. We are dating less, with less than 56 percent of Gen Z men reporting having been in a romantic relationship during their teenage years.
No one wants to be a thot, bop, lose aura or, worse, have their failures, intimate information and photos spread. More fear and more judgment equals less connection. Less connection equals less sex. This deficiency creates problems far beyond romance. Gen Z is sad and lonely: We feel less socially connected and are significantly less content with our lives than young people of the past.
If we want to get back to being sexy as a society, we need to let one another be weird.
Social media has created an environment where humiliating others on the internet is okay and where judgement is far too normalized, but we aren’t trapped forever. So if you ache to stop being such a loser and be freer to be ‘such’ a freak, be the change you want to see in the world. Next time you go into McConnell try to resist the urge to post photos of the shoeless hippies on Fizz. Ask your friends before you post sweaty photos of them on the internet. And for the love of god, please stop taking videos of strangers and posting them on TikTok. We all want to talk to strangers, have more sex, be messy, wear outrageous outfits, make more mistakes and worry less. The only problem is that we all have to give each other the necessary grace.
Kate Eisenreich SC ’27 is a lesbian who studies politics and hates boring people.