Understanding Collective Gaze in Social Media

Abstract

Based on the previous Panopticon theory, this paper proposes new perspectives to observe the gazing behaviors on social media, attempting to regard the onlookers as the gazers who watch and judge specific social issues in cyberspace. To explore the culture and behavioral characteristics of the gazers, this paper resorts to the Virtual Ethnography research method to construct a feasible interpretative model to understand and describe the definition of the collective gaze. This paper finds a dynamic relationship between the gazers and the gazees being gazed at, which can help figure out the mechanisms of the collective gaze, including the motivation of the gazing behaviors and the communication channels among the gazers. In addition, this paper finds that the impacts exerted by the collective gaze are quite complex after quantitative and qualitative analysis of the statistical data, images, and textual information obtained during the research. Overall, this paper provides a reasonable and understandable description of the new media landscape on social media brought by the collective gaze.