Mass Surveillance and the Panopticon Analysis

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In Michael Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”, the late eighteen century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's model of Panopticon was illustrated as a metaphor for the contemporary technologies of mass surveillance.

Originally derived from the measures to control “abnormal beings” against the spreading of a plague, the Panopticon is an architecture designed to induce power with a permanent sense of visibility. With a tower in the center, surrounded by cells, the prisoners can be monitored and watched at any given time from the central tower. The goal of this architectural plan was to strip away any privacy and therefore create fear induced self-regulation amongst the prisoners, with an unverifiable gaze - The prisoners can never identify when and by whom they are being observed from the tower.

In Foucault’s analysis, the concept of Panopticon is developed based on the manipulation of knowledge and power as two coexisting events. He believes that knowledge is obtained through the process of observation and examination in a system of panopticon. This knowledge is then used to regulate the behaviors and conduct of others, creating an imbalance in power and authority. Not only can knowledge create power, power can also be used to define knowledge where the authority can create “truth”. This unbalance of knowledge and power then marks a loss of power for the ends being watched, resulting in an unconditional acceptance of regulations and normalization.

In this sense, self-regulation and normalized behaviors can be achieved through imposed threat and fear of punishments and discipline. With every movement supervised and all events recorded in a system of total surveillance, violence is no longer a necessary component of social...

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...cipline and Punish." SparkNotes. SparkNotes, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .

"Find Renjie_charles_gu and his friends on Twoo." Renjie Gu blog on Netlog. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .

"Reactions to Global surveillance." Surveillance and society. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .

"Surveillance." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .

"Surveillance." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Sept. 2014. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .

"The Surveillance Society." K. A. Taipale: (Omniveillance). N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .

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