12/8/25

WATCH WHERE YOU’RE LOOKING

BY VICTORIA LIU

If you could see everything, why would you still choose so?

While sitting in on an architecture class, a long time ago now, our professor delighted us in showing us first the layout. We took in the screen projection, looking at the radial design.

Library | Centre for Mathematical Sciences

He asked the crowd, “What kind of building could this be?” A few hands went up, “A circus!”

one calls out into the lecture hall. The professor smiles before explaining this is the ground plan for a library around the 1910s, when surveillance was necessary from a central librarian’s desk. One point to oversee all. From this vantage, you could gaze down any angle and see into the details of activity amongst the stacks. Of course, that field of vision is limited to that exact angle at one moment in time unless you had others with you viewing into the other segments.

A thought I’ve had boiling away for a while now is that this is coincidentally exactly the same design as our experience on social media.

When you scroll Instagram, zooming in and peering into someone’s latest post or tapping into their story, holding to check where they are, what they’re doing, who they’re with, who they tag, the time they’re posting… for a minute, you peek into their present. Exactly the moment as they are experiencing it. And so forth for the comments, the likes, the reposts, the tags, the locations, the quotes, the retweets, the screenshots, the video responses, the trending hashtags, the obscure references. Every single detail and piece of information is a view into their life exactly how they’re living it. You see what posts your friends, their friends, or strangers like. You see precisely where, who and what they focus on, spend time with and acknowledge.

All from opening an app and tapping away.

This degree of accessible surveillance is unencumbered by your own physical or intimate proximity to the individuals online - it’s just about extending virtual interest and accepting or reciprocating. You are that same librarian, peering into the varied activities, gazing into their lives for that specific moment for which you have access. When someone accepts your interest, you are rewarded with that access - they allow you to monitor and compile details in their life. When you reciprocate, you allow others to do the same.

Zooming out further, the creators of these social networks are also panopticons. Users, being panopticons themselves, are flattened into stacks from the bird's eye view. User activities, attention and time are then compressed into those stacks and the monitors follow along, utilizing information as needed for their own agendas.

You have to wonder though - the ease in which all of this monitoring is accessible presents itself as a tempting opportunity to become obsessed with the experiences and focus of others. The availability of information on the activity of others makes it easy for others to become the way you experience your present. What others like, dislike, acknowledge, share, block, think of you…How others experience and understand you. Everything that “matters” becomes about everyone else.

Often though, I think there is incongruency between who you wish others think you are and who you are alone. It’s an interesting loop therefore, because you and I, we’re all aware of the monitoring and that we are influenced by the monitoring.

Isn’t it odd, then, that we’re all still here?

s/o to prof lewis who always made his floorplans so excessively large on projector screens. I now understand it’s because he wanted us to be consumed by the design so we could have a liminal experience, being in cramped auditorium seats.

The August 2025 version of this piece included my thoughts on how panopticons were also the designs for prisons. Monitors of the prisoners are within the prison themselves, should we regard them as prisoners as well? Prisoners forget what it’s like to feel free, just as we forget that a life lived through others is a life forfeited.