Panopticon

Foucault said, "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (qtd. in Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p. 53).

The panopticon has been cyborgized (Bauman & Lyon, 2013, p.55).

"It would never have occurred to Bentham that tempting and seducing were the keys to the panopticon's efficiency in eliciting desirable behavior" (Bauman & Lyon, 2013, p. 135).

This is an idea from Jeremy Bentham from 1791 which was a central guard tower inside a prison or reformatory. The prisoners never knew if their was a guard watching or not, to they would control themselves and internalize the discipline (Staples, 2000, p. 9).

Limitations

According to Jewkes (2004), the main limitation of the panopticon is that it “overstates the power of systems, institutions and processes and underplays the importance of the individual actor. The human element is often forgotten or ignored (a response known as ‘technological determinism’), but as Lyon reminds, us, socio-technical surveillance systems are ‘affected by people complying with, negotiating, or resisting surveillance’ (Lyon, 2003: 14)” (p. 196).

As a person caught in the gaze, the metaphor of the panopticon denies "any other positions" (Barard Wills in Jansson and Christensen, 201, p. 197).

Postmodernism

In postmodernism, video cameras become the panopticon (Staples, 2000, p.9).

See: *opticons; post-panoptic

References:

Bentham's Panopticon was powerful and offered "total surveyability" (Anderson, 2006, p. 184).

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jewkes, Y. (2004). Media & crime: Key approaches to criminology. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Jansson, A.,& Christensen, M. (2014). Media, surveillance and identity: Social perspective. New York: Peter Lang.

Staples, W. G. (2000). Everyday surveillance: Vigilance and visibility in postmodern life. 2^nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Zureik, E. (2003). "Theorizing surveillance; The case of the workplace." In D. Lyon Surveillance as social sorting: Privacy, risk and digital discrimination. New York: Routledge.