Surveillance Culture Is Impacting Your Dating Life

About this episode

The episode explores how surveillance culture affects relationships and dating, discussing panopticon theory and its implications in real life.

You can run (in circles) but you can’t hide from the panopticon, so of course we had to make our first episode of season four all about how surveillance culture plays out in relationships and sex. If you’ve not heard of the extremely esoteric (joking!) philosopher Foucault, don’t worry – we start the episode explaining exactly what panopticon theory is and why you should care, before diving into how we’re policing each other in every aspect of our relationships. You’ll be thankful to hear it’s not all theory, because we look at examples of panopticism in pop culture, like boyfriends being embarrassing and the Coldplay kiss cam (RIP that CEO) and discuss how this behaviour is slipping into our real lives. From telling our friends their boyfriends suck in group chats, to waiting for them to slip up on social media or IRL so we can cut them off, we’re all becoming cops in our relationships.  While some kind of accountability is always needed, especially when it comes to casual dating, we talk about why this rise in surveillance is making us change our own behaviour and how it’s only making things worse for minorities in particular (classic!).  We hope you enjoy the…

People in this episode

Host: Sextras

Topics covered

• surveillance culture
• relationships
• panopticon theory
• accountability
• pop culture
• dating

Keywords

• surveillance
• dating
• relationships
• Foucault
• panopticon
• pop culture
• accountability

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Coldplay

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