The Panopticon is helpful for understanding the new power and possibilities of social media for kid marketers. On social media, “people influence people,” according to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. “It’s no longer just about messages … broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information … shared between friends.” Social network friends market to each other, in other words, as “viral” tactics (also known as “word-of-mouth” and “buzz” tactics) seamlessly weave brands and commercial messages into communications among them. Users become “fans” and “friends” of brands, and get their friends to do the same; they share across their networks branded contests, quizzes, games, applications, and “widgets” – mini-applications whose viral power makes them, according to one industry insider, possibly the highest expression so far of online marketing in the post-advertising age. They create branded videos, songs, stories, poems, and photographs at company websites and virally distribute them to friends. And these are just a few examples from a huge and growing array of viral strategies.

Marketing as marketing disappears within the viral networks of social media platforms. Boundaries are broken down between marketers and kids (as kids market to each other); between content and advertising (as advertising now infuses, rather than interrupts, content); and between kids’ lives and entertainment (as their lives now become the content of that entertainment). It is truly the “perfection of [marketers’] power.” Kids, like the prisoners in the Panopticon, now bear the power marketing holds over them, and the marketers, like the Panopticon’s guards, drop from view, their power now automatic and self-executing, all the greater for its invisibility.