Social Media in an “Age of Madness” — Who Defines What Is Normal?

By Psychologist Cem Güner

In History of Madness, Michel Foucault does not treat madness merely as an illness arising within the individual mind. He examines which behaviours have been regarded as “normal” or “abnormal” in different historical periods and how societies create that distinction. For Foucault, the way madness is defined cannot be separated from the institutions, values and power relations of the society in which it appears.

One important implication of this idea is that societies do not merely define what is “abnormal”; they also establish the boundaries of what is “normal.”

Every period has norms concerning how we should live, behave and appear. Some are expressed openly, while others are learned without our noticing. Today, social media has become one of the most powerful spaces in which these norms are produced and circulated.

Social media does not only show us other people’s lives. It also shows us which lives are considered worthy of visibility.

Success, happiness, physical appearance, relationships, travel, social life and even the time a person sets aside for themselves are made continually visible. Yet much of what we encounter does not represent life as a whole; it consists of particular moments selected for sharing.

We see the anniversary photograph rather than the everyday difficulties of a relationship, the promotion rather than the uncertainty of a career, and the view rather than the exhaustion of a holiday. In other words, on social media we often encounter not people’s lives themselves, but the parts chosen for display.

Even so, these images may become the standards by which we evaluate our own lives.

We may compare our ordinary day with someone else’s holiday, our body with a selected and edited photograph, or our professional uncertainty with another person’s announcement of success. Over time, these comparisons may also change our perception of what is normal.

Foucault’s thought offers an interesting framework for understanding social media here. For Foucault, modern power is not only a force that prohibits or punishes. By producing norms, it can organise people’s behaviour and gradually lead individuals to monitor themselves according to those norms.

One of the best-known examples is the Panopticon, which Foucault discusses through Jeremy Bentham’s model. A central observation tower makes it possible to watch people in the surrounding cells at any moment. What matters most, however, is not that each person is actually watched continuously. Because they cannot know when they are being observed, they begin to behave as though they are.

Surveillance thereby ceases to be an external form of control and becomes an internalised mechanism through which a person regulates their own behaviour.

On social media, of course, we do not live inside a Panopticon in the classical sense. Yet the possibility of continual visibility can heighten our awareness of how others may evaluate us. When choosing a photograph, writing a thought, or deciding which part of life to show, we may take the gaze of a potential audience into account.

Over time, we do not merely know that others are looking at us; we may begin to look at ourselves through their imagined gaze.

The relationship between social media and the self then becomes more complex. A person no longer only lives an experience; they may also consider how that experience will appear to others. The value of a holiday, a relationship, an achievement or a body may begin to be judged not only by the lived experience, but by how it is represented.

This is not unique to social media. Human beings have always evaluated themselves partly through the gaze of others. Social media, however, makes that gaze continuous, measurable and visible.

Numbers of likes, followers, views and comments may become numerical indicators of social acceptance. The previously uncertain question “What do other people think of me?” can begin to look as though it has an answer in numbers.

Another important feature of social media is that the content we see does not appear in a neutral way. Platform algorithms offer new material based on what we engage with. Content that holds our attention longer, evokes strong emotion or generates interaction may gain greater visibility.

The world we see on social media is therefore not a simple reflection of society. It is also a world selected and ordered by technological systems.

This matters for our perception of “normal.” Repeated exposure to certain bodies, lifestyles, forms of success or opinions can create the impression that they are more common than they truly are. Ordinary life may be less visible because it is not considered worth sharing or does not generate enough engagement.

The “normal life” presented by social media may therefore be very different from the average life people actually live.

It would, of course, also be mistaken to view social media only in terms of surveillance, comparison and pressure. Social media enables people to communicate, access information, form communities and make visible experiences that were previously underrepresented in public life. The same platform may be a source of comparison and pressure for one person and a space of belonging and expression for another.

The task is therefore not simply to decide whether social media is good or bad, but to recognise how it affects our sense of self and the things we accept as normal.

Following Foucault, perhaps the question we need to ask today is broader than “Is social media watching us?”

By which standards does social media teach us to watch ourselves?

Norms may not be most powerful when someone tells us how we should be. Sometimes a norm becomes most effective when, without any external demand, we begin evaluating ourselves by its standards.

From this perspective, when looking at social media in an “age of madness,” the central question is not who is normal and who is abnormal.

The central question is who defines what we call normal—and how.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher and historian of ideas. His work on madness, medicine, prisons, sexuality, knowledge, power and surveillance made him one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.