Assignment 6: Conforming to Norms and the Leviathan

Unknowingly, people tend to conform to norms in communities, whether online or not, in order to continue to preserve our existence. According to Patricia Wallace, in order to accomplish this we “[conform] to social conventions and [adhere] to laws that restrict our freedoms” (69). Originally proposed by Thomas Hobbes is the idea of the Leviathan, a system of seemingly authoritative power over others in order to create a safe environment. People are therefore careful, for example, about what they reveal about themselves on dating websites or what kind of pictures they put of themselves on Facebook. There may be an unknown being overlooking every picture we place on Facebook to make sure that they are not inappropriate. I have personally never heard of someone being kicked off of the site, but that is because people are not willing to risk putting inappropriate things on the site; we are fearful of that unknown, authoritative, and watchful power. We are forced by an unknown being to “give up freedoms in order to preserve the value and energy of the medium itself” (Wallace 69). It is the social norm to give up some of those freedoms to permit the natural flow of the internet and allow it to progress and flourish.

When thinking about the Leviathan, I immediately thought of Tom, the creator of myspace. When I first heard of this phenomenon, I was very interested and intrigued as to what it was and what the attraction was, so I created my own account. The next time I logged on, I had my first friend request: Tom. As the creator of myspace, he is automatically positioned as a new accounts first friend request. He is therefore everyone’s friend on myspace: Tom is the myspace Leviathan. He is the seemingly “mortal god” (69), that watchful eye that everyone fears. He has final power and authority over every myspace page…or so we think. Is he really watching over everyone’s myspace page? Tom, the Leviathan, emerges as the moderator. We will never really know, but we aren’t willing to test the waters. When one sets up their myspace page, they typically set it up similar to other pages they have seen, such as their friends’ pages. They conform to the social norms and standards of myspace that the Leviathan enforces and censor according to how others have done so. It would be difficult to imagine a computer mediated world without a Leviathan because the Leviathan is who sets the norms and conventions of an online space.