The Psychology of Watching and Being Watched

The Panopticon Went Open-Plan

There was a time when surveillance was something done to us. We imagined it as a one-way mirror: the grey bureaucrat in the watchtower, the citizen below. But the mirror has shattered, and its shards are everywhere, glowing softly in our pockets, perched on lampposts, hovering in cloud storage. We’re all watching, all being watched, all curating our visibility like PR consultants of the self. The panopticon went open-plan.

Michel Foucault would have recognised the structure immediately. In Discipline and Punish, he described how Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the panopticon, was less about architecture than about psychology. The prisoners, unsure when the guard might be watching, behaved as though they were being observed constantly. Surveillance didn’t need to be real; it only needed to be possible. The gaze became internal. The prisoner, Foucault wrote, “becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

We’ve built that system again, but with better UX design. No one needed to force us into the tower. We lined up for it, installed the apps, enabled the tracking, and set notifications to “on.” We even decorate our cells. We call it self-expression.

The Velvet Leash of the Attention Economy

The modern gaze doesn’t sit in a central tower; it scrolls, refreshes, and occasionally cancels. It doesn’t punish deviation, it nudges, flatters, and rewards. What used to be paranoia is now etiquette. You don’t have to fear being watched anymore; you have to manage it gracefully.

The French philosopher might have found this evolution grimly elegant. Surveillance used to be about control; now it’s about desire. We crave attention, and the systems that watch us feed that craving with mathematical precision. The like button is a soft disciplinary tool. The follower count, a velvet leash. The attention economy doesn’t imprison us, it seduces us into monitoring ourselves.

From Watchtower to Waterfall

Zygmunt Bauman, ever the sociologist of the slippery, called this liquid modernity, a world where structures melt, hierarchies dissolve, and everything solid flows. In this liquid state, surveillance no longer sits in the hands of the state or the corporate tower; it drips through the social fabric. The watchers and the watched blend into one another. Power is decentralised, participatory, almost democratic in its cruelty.

This is what Bauman later termed liquid surveillance. We record each other constantly, under the banner of safety, transparency, or simply habit. Doorbell cameras watch the neighbours; the neighbours watch back. Every minor injustice, every street corner mishap, becomes content. The Stasi never dreamed of this many volunteers.

The Gaze That Writes Us

Yet the most fascinating transformation is internal. To live under constant potential observation changes the texture of thought. It sharpens self-awareness into self-consciousness, a kind of psychic curvature toward the imagined audience. Psychologists call it “audience anxiety.” You never stop performing because you never know when the curtain might rise.

Social media amplifies this into pathology. It offers the illusion of intimacy with the machinery of mass surveillance. We show ourselves to the crowd and call it connection. We post confessions, aestheticised pain, curated authenticity. Even our acts of retreat, our digital detoxes, our “close friends only” stories, are public gestures. Privacy, once a right, has become a branding strategy.

There’s something almost theological about it. We’re always seen, always judged, yet never quite sure by whom. The divine eye has been replaced by the algorithmic one: omnipresent, inscrutable, slightly bored. The moral dimension has drained away, leaving a metrics-based spirituality. You don’t confess your sins, you share them, formatted for engagement.

The Self as Content

In this environment, behaviour begins to mutate. The sociological merges with the psychological: the gaze doesn’t merely observe us; it writes us. We anticipate how we’ll look under observation, and act accordingly. We pre-edit our opinions, soften our edges, rehearse authenticity. Irony becomes the only safe register, it signals self-awareness while keeping sincerity at arm’s length.

Foucault might say we’ve achieved the ultimate refinement of discipline: self-policing disguised as self-promotion. The system doesn’t need to punish transgression when it can make conformity feel like agency. The prisoner now designs his own uniform.

But the twist in this story is that visibility, once a means of control, now doubles as validation. The gaze gives life meaning. To be seen is to exist. We perform not just for approval but for ontological confirmation. It’s the existentialism of analytics: “I post, therefore I am.”

Performative Privacy and the Theatre of Resistance

This creates what we might call the performance of privacy. We don’t reject surveillance; we curate it. We choose what to hide, how to hide it, and crucially, how to signal that hiding to others. “I’m taking a break from social media,” we announce to our followers. “I value my privacy,” we say on platforms that track our heartbeat. Even our silence is designed for visibility.

Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquidity helps explain the strange psychology of this era. Everything leaks. Data leaks, secrets leak, emotion leaks. We don’t inhabit solid identities anymore, but shifting, composite ones that bleed into digital space. The surveillance society doesn’t simply watch us, it liquefies us. We are both participants and residue.

And because surveillance is now participatory, moral lines blur. We justify our watching as vigilance, awareness, justice. We film the police; we film each other; we film ourselves. The act of observation has become a civic virtue. To watch is to care. To be seen is to belong. But the result is not moral clarity, it’s mutual paranoia. Everyone’s an informant now, and everyone’s afraid of being the next exhibit.

Psychopolitics and the Algorithmic Soul

The political theorist Byung-Chul Han calls this psychopolitics: a system in which control no longer operates through coercion but through voluntary transparency. We surrender privacy willingly, mistaking exposure for empowerment. Freedom has become indistinguishable from participation.

And participation, of course, is monetised. The data economy doesn’t care about the drama of our selfhood, it only wants predictability. Every click, swipe, and pause adds to the model of who we are. The gaze no longer needs to discipline; it simply needs to measure. The predictable self is the profitable self.

There’s a subtle cruelty in this arrangement. It doesn’t demand obedience; it demands performance. You don’t have to conform, you just have to produce. The algorithm doesn’t punish dissent; it buries it. Visibility becomes both carrot and cage.

Irony as a Coping Mechanism

Irony, then, is our last refuge. We laugh at our complicity, post memes about oversharing, mock our own surveillance fatigue. The humour is defensive, a pressure valve for the absurdity of being constantly observed. But even that irony is a form of content, folded back into the feed. The system metabolises resistance with alarming efficiency.

Every act of withdrawal becomes another signal. Delete your account, and the silence itself is interpreted. The panopticon has no exit door because it doesn’t need one. You can leave the room, but the gaze remains, ambient, algorithmic, unbothered.

The Beautiful Cage

This raises a question that Foucault’s 20th-century readers didn’t have to ask: what does freedom look like in a world where visibility is the default state? Not the political freedom to speak, but the psychological freedom to exist unobserved, unperformed, unseen. Can you be private in a culture that defines presence as public proof of life?

Perhaps the answer is not resistance but reclamation. Not to flee visibility, but to inhabit it differently, to be seen without performing, to post without pandering. There’s dignity, maybe even subversion, in the uncurated moment. The photo without filters, the silence that isn’t performative, the thought that never becomes content.

But that’s easier said than done. The internal camera never quite switches off. Even alone, we imagine the audience, ghost followers in our minds. We frame ourselves through an imaginary lens, pre-emptively editing the story. Privacy isn’t gone; it’s been psychologised. The surveillance lives inside us now, humming quietly in the circuitry of selfhood.

Bauman once said that modern life is defined by constant connection and perpetual insecurity. That’s the paradox of the watched world: the more visible we become, the less certain we feel. The gaze that promised connection has delivered anxiety. The spotlight is warm, but it burns.

And yet, mocking it entirely feels disingenuous. Visibility isn’t just vanity; it’s survival. In a fragmented, unstable world, to be seen is to remain legible, to the system, to others, to oneself. We might be complicit in our own observation, but we’re also trying, in our fumbling way, to stay real.

Maybe that’s the truest expression of the contemporary condition: a kind of anxious exhibitionism, half-aware, half-addicted. We are both prisoners and performers, trapped and thrilled by the glass walls we built. Foucault warned that visibility is a trap. Bauman warned that modernity dissolves its own boundaries. Neither could have predicted that we’d turn surveillance into a pastime.

But here we are, updating our stories, refreshing our feeds, and joking about the algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves. Big Brother didn’t have to come for us, we built him a ring light and gave him a TikTok account.

The real trick, perhaps, is not to escape the gaze but to see it clearly. To recognise that the watcher and the watched are the same creature, split by the mirror of the screen. To remember that the desire to be seen is also the desire to matter. And to admit, with a certain tragicomic honesty, that we’ve made surveillance beautiful.

References:

Bauman, Z. and Lyon, D. (2012) Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Debord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.
Han, B.-C. (2017) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London: Verso Books.
Lyon, D. (2018) The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. New York: Wiley.