Persuasive Surveillance

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Every aspect of a person’s life is being surveilled. People are always watching and documenting someone’s every move. Modern technology has made it easy to surveil people and track them. Michel Foucault believed that surveillance “compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, [and] excludes” people. (Foucault, 1977, p. 183) Surveillance is used to categorize people who do not fit society’s norm. This happens because information is retained and stored, which it then can be used to place different people into different categories. Surveillance is used to control the behavior of, label, and hierarchize people. In Discipline & Punish, Michel Foucault describes how the first prisons used surveillance to watch the prisoners in the 1600’s. …show more content…

The government retains the data so that it could be used in the future. “The amount of data currently collected as we go about our everyday lives—intelligent highway systems, consumer transactions, traffic patterns on the Internet, medical, educational, financial, and insurance, and so on—strongly suggests we are moving into a Panoptic society” (Blanchette, 2000, p. 34). The government monitors people’s every move, but people don’t know when the government is actually listening and when they aren’t. This is just like Foucault’s Panoptic prison idea with the guard tower watching the prisoners. Furthermore, Lessig (1999) believes that “individual behavior is regulated in four ways, by law, norms, technology and the market” (as cited in Blanchette, 2000, p. 40). Individual behavior is regulated by law because people are afraid to break the rules due to constant surveillance. Individual behavior is regulated by norms because people are placed into like groups due to categorization from surveillance. Individual behavior is regulated by technology by the advances of surveillance technology to be used to help categorize people. Lastly, it is regulated by the market

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