Find My Friends: Location-Sharing Ideologies and Peer Surveillance Practices

This thesis investigates the use of Find My Friends in the context of the Claremont Colleges. Students choose to location-share under initial rhetorical justifications of social reciprocity, and community-orientedness, and peer-safety. Drawing from ethnographic interviews conducted with users at the colleges, I argue that the infrastructure of Find My Friends in conjunction with the social and physical proximities of the Claremont environment creates a distinctive condition where users are subject to what I term as a “virtual, neoliberal, and participatory panopticon.” Here, users are seemingly empowered through the application’s neutralizing collapse of reciprocity and hierarchy that are seen in conventional surveillance structures. Instead, I suggest that Find My Friends disempowers its users as it reproduces the logics of surveillance on an interpersonal scale and invades the ways in which we move and interact within the social sphere.