ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a range of examples, from Uber’s rating system for passengers and drivers to real-time employee feedback tools used by HR departments, to describe the growing phenomenon of ‘coercive visibility’, which uses digital tools to render aspects of individuals’ work and social interactions visible and quantifiable, thereby institutionalising the critical judgement of non-intimates and imposing conformity with organisational or institutional norms. It argues that coercive visibility is a core feature of digitalisation and contemporary life, involving an extension of the logic of the public arena through ever more areas of society, as a consequence of digitalisation, mediatisation and the ubiquity of service work. Routine exposure to the critical judgement of strangers, as a result of feedback apps, online rating systems and digital monitoring, facilitates a transition from participation to self-consciousness as the default relation to experience, leading to the internalisation of an exterior, spectator position. Separated from stable circles of recognition, we are forced to work continuously to establish our identities before ever-new audiences of strangers. Individuals become performative, plastic, polymorphous figures, adapting their conduct and self-expression to compete for the attention, sympathy and approbation of their audiences. This condition aligns perfectly with the insistence in late modern societies that we be ‘flexible’, actively embracing ‘change’, moving between jobs or careers as the needs of the ‘labour market’ require, swiftly adopting new technologies and consumer trends as they appear and embracing each new revolution in social norms. Coercive visibility, diffused across society, therefore replaces closed institutions and the Foucauldian panopticon as the central disciplinary technique of late modernity.
