Supplemental Post #5 - Emma

I just want to talk briefly about The Circle, a reality show on Netflix that I watched last year, just before the pandemic and lockdowns began, and which just last week released its second season. My experience watching it last year became a kind of time marker: I remember thinking, the week before spring break in March, when classes went online and I had to interact with my friends and family through a screen, “this is just like The Circle.” 

The show itself seemed to start as a social experiment and eventually became a game of strategy. Eight participants have to live in isolation, each with their own apartments, and they can only interact with each other through a social media called “The Circle”, which allows them to chat via text to other participants and view each others’ profiles. Some participants choose to play as themselves, and some choose to play as “catfishes” (their “hot friend” or boyfriend, depending on who they think will be the most likeable). The goal is to avoid getting eliminated based on popularity votes, and of the surviving player, the “most liked” at the end wins a cash prize. 

The first season did contain its fair share of backstabbing and “strategy,” with a microcosm of social media delivering on its promise of people being “fake” and calling each other out on it. It did, however, turn out to foster wholesome friendships and ultimately was, in the end, a popularity contest, as the show promised. The second season, however, (and the French version, which I admittedly watched as well), plays much more into the interest of gamification and demonstrates mostly the various ways in which each player can trick the rest of the players to get to the top. Instead of the winner being the most liked, it is a competition of outsmarting the others.

Creepy foreshadowing about our own isolation aside, the show delivers on Ouellette’s “democracy game” in an interesting way. Each participant is completely alone and makes choices about who to talk to, being “active, self-possessive, and entrepreneurial citizenry” (204). Their decisions about who to send home are made together, and outwardly in the interest of the group—but, like in many democracies, each person is ultimately looking out for themselves alone.