The Panopticon Factor: Privacy and Surveillance in the Digital Age (original) (raw)
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Public Sphere and Panopticism: Considerations about surveillance in everyday life
En la actualidad, no es posible discutir cuestiones relacionadas con el espacio público sin mencionar las estructuras tecnológicas que potencian el debate y el ejercicio de la ciudadanía. En el modelo actual de la auto-comunicación de masas, los ciudadanos ya no son sólo espectadores en las arenas de la discusión pública, sino participantes activos en un proceso que rompe con el paradigma tradicional de difusión (medio) -receptor (audiencia). Las nuevas tecnologías de la comunicación ofrecen enormes beneficios, pero siempre hay un precio que pagar. Irónicamente, las tecnologías que aumentan la ciudadanía son las mismas que intensifican el ojo electrónico y la sociedad de la vigilancia. Este artículo retoma el concepto de Foucault de panopticismo y la adaptación del diseño arquitectónico de Jeremy Bentham a las relaciones de poder. El presente manuscrito construye, de forma teórica, un acercamiento entre la sociedad de la información y los aspectos modernos de vigilancia en la vida cotidiana.
Philosophy & Technology, 2016
This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through (self-) disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance.
Democracy is watching you: from panopticism to the Security State
The essay that the reader is holding in his hands is an attempt to understand the extent to which, in the present-day, we are watching the return of a visibility, exposure and surveillance system that a utilitarian author like Jeremy Bentham baptized of Panopticon, or “place where everything is seen”. In fact, the pinnacle of the “information society”, and the present scenario of widespread surveillance intensified by the establishment of Security State post-September 11th, has implications in the practices of control over individuals on a daily basis, what Deleuze calls “societies of control” at the same time it contributes to the frontiers dilution between the public sphere and the private sphere. In this sense, we consider it is important to do a review on “disciplinary societies” surveillance and the control of “biopower” theorized by Michel Foucault tosubsequently realize how new surveillance technologies increase, exponentially, the subjects’ transparency.
Surveillance, Panopticism, and Self-Discipline in the Digital Age
The objective of this paper is to revisit the metaphor of the Panopticon, borrowed by Michel Foucault from Jeremy Bentham to describe the development of disciplinary institutions in Western societies from the early nineteenth century, and to examine its relevance for the analysis of modern electronic means of surveillance. Widely used in the early stages of the study of new surveillance technologies, the metaphor of the Panopticon, particularly in the field of 'surveillance studies,' is growingly seen as inadequate to understand the impact of the latest surveillance tools and practices. This paper seeks to show that dominant interpretations of Foucault's use of Panopticon as referring to techniques of domination or to 'power over,' while legitimate as regards some of his earlier writings, overlook Foucault's later works on technologies of the self. That is, in Panoptic dispositifs in particular, as well as in settings involving power/knowledge configurations defining 'normality' more generally, individuals may end up exercising power over themselves without any coercion. It is argued here that the development of modern information and communication technologies may be said to produce a setting, the description of which as 'panoptic' is even more pertinent than was the case with respect to Western societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building upon recent empirical works on the 'chilling effect,' particularly in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013, the article discusses modern technologies of the self—self-restraint and self-censorship—that new technologies, enabling different forms of surveillance, produce in Western societies. It also outlines the areas in which the notion of the Panopticon may be useful in terms of guiding research into self-discipline and self-restraint in the context of the proliferation of modern techniques of surveillance.
Cut off the Head of the King: Contemporary Surveillance Analysis and the Society of Control
The panoptic architecture described by Michel Foucault in, Discipline and Punish (1976), has been a dominant paradigm in surveillance studies since its inception as an organized field of inquiry in the 1970s. However, over the last decade this paradigm has come under increasing criticism. As Kevin Haggerty (2006) states: “Foucault continues to reign supreme in surveillance studies and it is perhaps time to cut off the head of the king.” An increasing number of commentators argue that the model of the panopticon fails to account for the programmed character of smart surveillance technology. They argue that these technologies do not seek to discipline behaviors as much as they aim to route bodies through different surveillance environments by events of in and exclusion on the basis of massive searches of databases. Seeking a paradigm better able to account for the relationship between software algorithms with big data, some commentators have turned to Deleuze and his 1992 critique of Foucault in the, “Postscript on Societies of Control”. They frequently adopt Deleuze’s notion of the rhizomatically structured, surveillant assemblage, as a model better adapted than the panopticon to account for the capabilities of today’s digital networks. In this paper I argue that Deleuze’s notion of the surveillant assemblage may in fact be better adapted to account for the networked character of electronic surveillance than Foucault’s panopticon. However, I argue that Foucault himself was very aware of the limits of panopticism and that his contribution to surveillance studies must not be limited to that model alone. During his 1978 lectures, Sécurité Territoire Population, Foucault introduced a new paradigm – les dispositifs de sécurité. This paradigm exceeds the panoptic paradigm and overlaps with Deleuze’s model in four important ways: 1) security mechanisms operate at the level of populations (both human and non-human) and do not depend on closed spaces like the prison, classroom and barracks in order to function. 2) Security mechanisms function in tandem with disciplinary regimes. This allows Foucault to account for the fact that the disruptive effects of electronic surveillance networks do not replace disciplinary spaces. In fact they capture disciplined bodies in the process of virtualizing them. 3) The security mechanism is a non-hierarchical form of governance. Those engaged in the activity of electronic surveillance are as much subject to surveillance as those whom they observe. 4) For Foucault and Deleuze, the ‘meaning’ of the security mechanism is a function of both the intended and the unintended effects of the system. This gives the paradigm the flexibility to explain the significance of both false positives and false negatives in the routine functioning of surveillance networks.
Hacking the panopticon: Distributed online surveillance and resistance
Sociology of Crime Law and Deviance, 2008
Surveillance studies scholars have embraced Foucault's panopticon as a central metaphor in their analysis of online monitoring technologies, despite several architectural incompatibilities between eighteenth and nineteenth century prisons and twenty-first century computer networks.