Planting in the pandemic : surveillance on social media

Abstract

This article looks at interest-driven and informal social media practices that have flourished in the pandemic period and its ensuing renaissance of domesticity. It investigates how tending plants and discussing them on social media serve as a particular site for connecting around loving and taking care of plants. Its focus is on the discursive means with which posters – guided by social media algorithms – rhetorically co-construct a morally acceptable version of a pandemic lifestyle around houseplants. More specifically, drawing on multimodal discourse studies, critical sociolinguistics and work on digital surveillance, it investigates how members of a Finland-based social media site observe and monitor themselves and others via their linguistically heterogeneous and multimodal posts. The paper demonstrates how constructions of tending plants highlight a normative subject who besides cultivating plants also cultivates themselves and others in the allegedly safe microcosm of the home, surrounded by the risk-ridden, tension-full, dangerous pandemic world. In the same way, as in many other types of informal and interest-driven social media activities, surveillance forms a crucial part of the routine digital activities and interactions about and around plants. Three manifestations of surveillance are discussed in detail: site-specific panoptic surveillance, peer surveillance and self-surveillance.