Social media, mirror of our gaze

Social media, neither virtuous nor vicious. What if the real subject wasn’t these platforms, but the partial and subjective gaze we cast upon them? I invite nuance and introspection.

The illusion of a single reality

Institutional discourse often targets social media, denouncing their supposedly harmful effects on youth. The recent investigative commission of the National Assembly on the TikTok platform is a striking example, whose methods revealed an accusatory bias toward a youth deemed passive and influencers labeled as dangerous. This stigmatizing approach misses an obvious point: as with anything, what we see of a phenomenon fundamentally depends on how we look at it.

Let’s imagine the town hall of a Parisian arrondissement, take the magnificent building of the 19^th arrondissement town hall, which faces the Buttes-Chaumont park. A photograph can capture its sunny facade, flanked by a few trees, composing an image of bucolic Paris. But one need only move a few meters to photograph, on another side of the same building, a pile of glass debris, people in distress and precarious tents. On one side, the postcard; on the other, social drama. The building is identical, but the gaze cast upon it produces a radically different effect and discourse.

This metaphor obviously applies to social media, and all the more so because their very nature makes any overall vision impossible, as their content is shaped for and by each individual. Unlike yesterday’s television, which offered identical programs for everyone and allowed common analysis, the social media experience is atomized, personalized to the extreme. To grasp their “reality,” one would need to be able to observe billions of unique feeds simultaneously. Admitting this means recognizing that our own gaze on these platforms is, by definition, partial and often shows us only the facet we wish, or fear, to see.

As Donna Haraway emphasizes in her theory of situated knowledge, all knowledge is produced from a particular position, and claiming absolute objectivity is what she calls the “God trick,” the illusion of seeing everything from nowhere, a form of utopian and false ubiquity. Recognizing the partiality of our gaze is not a weakness but a necessary condition for a more just understanding of social phenomena, it seems to me.

What art teaches us about the gaze

In reality, the most enlightening subject is rarely the observed object, but rather the observer’s gaze. This primacy of perspective is a lesson that art history teaches. When we admire the work of painters who choose as their motif a landscape, a still life or a portrait, what captivates us? Is it the subject itself, in its material banality? No, it’s the artist’s singular vision, the way their gaze transfigures reality and speaks to us.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers have little to do with botany, but they have everything to do with the artist’s hallucinatory and vibrant gaze on the world, a gaze that speaks directly to our humanity. Similarly, Mount Sainte-Victoire, which the inhabitants of Aix-en-Provence see every day, becomes under Cézanne’s brush a formal and chromatic obsession that transmits to us his passion for nature. The artist awakens in us a desire for wonder that he managed to preserve and that he bequeaths to us through his canvas. The subject is only a pretext for the expression of subjectivity and its sensitive sharing.

As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Eye and the Mind (1960), « The painter brings his body », that is, his subjective perception of the world. Thus, when we analyze a discourse on social media, the most interesting thing may not be what it says about the networks themselves, but what it reveals about its author: their humanity, their political positioning, their anxieties or their hopes. It is by deciphering this gaze that we can understand the systems of domination at work, the ideological tendencies of an era, and very often, the complex and sometimes fearful relationship that adults maintain with youth and their new modes of expression.

The intellectual’s gaze: between panic and partiality

Let’s take the example of François Jost’s article, « The vertigo of the challenge or when social media create stupidity », published in AOC magazine on September 10, 2025. François Jost is a semiologist whose work I admire. Following in the footsteps of thinkers like Roland Barthes, he produced pioneering analyses of television apparatus and discourse from the 1980s onwards, at a time when such an object of study was deemed unworthy, compared to film studies. He had the audacity to cast a critical and structured gaze on television, showing that it constructed a discourse as complex as that of cinema or literature. His gaze was then that of a pioneer, and he taught me a lot. I also often worked alongside him, having been a student then responsible for the video production service for students in the 1990s at the same university as him. And we had collaborated for the Image Meetings #6 : « Intimacy, images, social media. Existing and living together in the digital age » organized by Noémie Rubat du Mérac for the House of Image in Grenoble.

Yet, in this article, this same intellectual casts a gaze on social media that seems to have lost this openness. He writes for example: « I can’t help thinking that these behaviors stem from a double stupidity, one cognitive, the other ethical. » This peremptory formulation sets the overall tone... Further on, he states: « The goal of this text is to show how social media encourage stupid behaviors, “bullshit,” and put people in physical danger (risk of death or suicide) or psychological danger (harassment). »

The discourse is entirely accusatory, never mentioning the slightest positive effect, whether it be access to knowledge, citizen mobilization or social connection. His article even goes so far as to implicitly present Chinese regulation as a model, noting that « In China, where the algorithms used by the application are conceived, adolescents only have the right to forty minutes per day on the site. Content is controlled there, which led the application to ban, in June 2025, the hashtag #SkinnyTok. » This reference to an authoritarian regime as a desirable regulatory model is to say the least troubling coming from an intellectual who has always defended freedom of expression.

What does his gaze tell us? It offers us the spectacle of a form of intellectual panic faced with a phenomenon that, obviously, escapes his old analytical grids. This is no longer a gaze that seeks to understand, but a gaze that condemns from a position of superiority.

This posture resembles an analysis of the automobile that would focus exclusively on the number of deaths it causes, citing statistic after statistic on fatal accidents. Such an argument, exclusively centered on danger, would hold up logically and could lead to the conclusion that this means of transport should be banned. But this would ignore, by deliberate choice, everything that the automobile has brought in terms of emancipation, economic development and connection between territories. But one could also look only at its disastrous ecological impact. An object always allows for a plurality of narratives. By choosing only one angle, we don’t describe the object, we only tell our own point of view.

For an ethics of critical thinking

The role of the intellectual is not simply to give an opinion, but to offer reading keys, to work on an analysis that the rhythm of daily life doesn’t allow everyone. This position confers a responsibility: that of nuance, of honesty, of awareness of the partiality of one’s own gaze and of a scientific approach, in the sense of human sciences. It’s not about renouncing to assert a point of view, but to do so with the humility of knowing that it is only one point of view among others, and not the description of a total truth.

To go beyond simple opinion debates, an approach in the direction of human sciences is therefore necessary. This implies defining and sharing our judgment criteria. On what basis do we qualify a use as “good” or “bad”? What indicators do we use? It is by constructing common analytical frameworks, as proposed for example by sociologist Dominique Cardon in his work on digital culture, that we can truly dialogue. Disagreement is healthy and productive, but it requires a shared foundation so as not to become a dialogue of the deaf. The scientific approach allows us to recognize that we cast different gazes on the same phenomenon.

François Jost himself moreover recognizes in his article that « Very generally, researchers have a relativistic conception of stupidity (one is always another’s fool). » But he immediately adds: « I take an adverse point of view. There are acts that are absolutely stupid. » This simplistic position is precisely what poses a problem: it refuses complexity and nuance in favor of a clear-cut moral judgment.

I am therefore not saying that François Jost’s gaze is false in itself; I am saying that it is partial and that it informs us primarily about himself. On the other hand, his claim to describe the reality of social media is, it, certainly erroneous, because no one can embrace such a totality. As Yuk Hui showed in On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), digital objects are fundamentally relational and processual, they exist only in and through the interactions they mediate.

This is why it seems essential to me on the subject of social media to open the door to dialogue, particularly with the first concerned, young people, and to assume our subjectivity without disguising it as objectivity. It’s a question of intellectual probity.

Redefining our object

Finally, what exactly are we talking about? What is a “social network”? It is, by definition, a space for collective exchange between human beings. It’s the village square, the family, the classroom, the market, the street, the stairwell. The human being is a « political animal », as Aristotle already said. Social networks have always existed, because they are the very condition of our collective existence. Today’s are only the continuation of our political reality, by digital means, mainly via the phones we carry with us.

For example, the park in which I am sitting is a social network, whose nature changes over the hours: it is not the same in the morning almost empty, in the late afternoon with families and children playing, or in the evening with the neighborhood’s drug users. The same goes for the digital universe. Asserting that Twitter would be, as a block, more dangerous than LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook is an abusive simplification. Everything depends on the communities that form there, the conversations that take place there, the moments and subjects that cross society. It’s a moving ecosystem of infinite complexity.

This is why asserting that « social media create stupidity », the very title of François Jost’s article, informs more about the posture of the one who states it than about the object of his analysis. It’s looking at an immense world through the small end of a deforming and frightened spyglass. The author himself moreover reveals his biased approach when he writes: « The risks of the Internet are regularly denounced – addiction, hatred, harassment and many other things –, but, curiously, the phenomenon of challenges doesn’t always belong to this list. » This formulation suggests that his objective is to add an additional line to an already well-supplied indictment, rather than to analyze with nuance a complex phenomenon.

I formulate this criticism with all the friendship and respect I have for François Jost’s career, for whom I have great esteem, but it seems necessary to me to point out what amounts to an intellectual facility lacking scientific rigor. What we expect from intellectuals, I believe, is not a confirmed opinion, but an informed vision, which assumes its own subjectivity to better illuminate the complexity of the world.

Intellectual probity is demanding. Intellectuals can and must retain their point of view and their subjectivity, but this must be assumed as such, without presenting itself as supposed objectivity. Easy and seductive discourses on the dangers of social media easily find an audience ready to be convinced, but they deprive us of true critical distance on these complex phenomena. We need nuanced analyses that recognize the plurality of experiences and uses, rather than global condemnations that only fuel intergenerational fears.