Social Media Interaction as Surveillance and Panopticon: A Digital Ethnography of a Muslim Youth Community
Abstract
Social media platforms have become central arenas for identity formation and community interaction, yet their role as instruments of disciplinary power within religious communities remains underexplored, particularly in non-Western contexts. This study examines how digital social interactions within a youth Muslim religious community function as a panoptic mechanism that shapes members' self-presentation practices and collective identity on Instagram. Grounded in Michel Foucault's theoretical framework of panopticism, discursive power, and subjectivation, the study employs a qualitative approach within a critical constructivist paradigm. Digital ethnography was used as the primary research strategy, combining digital observation of the community's official and personal member accounts with semi-structured interviews conducted with six active members of the MM community (pseudonym), a youth-based Islamic organization in South Tangerang, Indonesia. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke's framework. Findings reveal three interconnected dynamics. First, religious knowledge held by community advisors and leaders operates as a dominant discursive authority that disciplines members' digital behavior both overtly and covertly. Second, members internalize communal norms of piety, resulting in self-censorship, cautious content selection, and the reproduction of symbolic religious narratives on their Instagram accounts. Third, members actively negotiate spaces of personal freedom through the use of alternative accounts, selective audience features such as "close friends," and strategic content curation. These findings demonstrate that Instagram functions simultaneously as a site of disciplinary surveillance and a contested space for identity negotiation. This study contributes empirically and theoretically by demonstrating that digital panopticism in religious communities is not a replication of classical surveillance models, but a discursively constructed process in which religious knowledge itself becomes the primary instrument of normalization.
Keywords: Digital Panopticism; Discursive Power; Religious Identity; Social Media; Subjectivation; Digital Ethnography.
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