Panopticon (Internet culture)

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The idea of the Panopticon originated with the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham as a prison design that would allow an observer to monitor all the prisoners at all times, without any prisoner being aware of whether he was being monitored or not. The French philosopher Michel Foucault later compared Bentham's ideas with modern society in his work Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon concept of continuous anonymous surveillance has been applied to the Internet as a metaphor for the online monitoring of Internet users’ activities and the collection of their personal data. Governments, corporations, criminals, and even regular citizens – in what is called the Participatory Panopticon – can contribute to the mass surveillance of Internet users.

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[edit] Big (and Little) Brother

Governments and businesses are perhaps the most obvious candidates to be considered the Internet Panopticon’s figurative prison guards. After the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 the United States created the United States Department of Homeland Security that has incorporated the USA PATRIOT Act that has expanded the Federal Government’s powers of surveillance and fueled other programs such as the Information Awareness Office –which has some citizens, such as the Surveillance Camera Players [1], very concerned about their rights to privacy. [1]

However, as Tom Brignall writes, “One does not have to wait for the passage of an anti-terrorist bill to see elements of a Panopticon model being currently used on the Internet,” because the private sector has long monitored Internet users’ online activities. [2] The term “Little Brother” refers to private companies that use electronic surveillance to track the activities, interests, and purchases of Internet users in order to decrease risk and increase the effectiveness of their advertisements. [3] This surveillance conducted by “Little Brother” has only expanded with the popularity of Web 2.0 and social network services, many of which are increasingly being bought by large corporations, in which users contribute their personal information by their own free will. Using Digg as an example, Wil Harris explains that ""Digg knows what stories you've submitted, what demographic you're in, how other people in your demographic react to what you post."[4]

[edit] Participatory Panopticon

In Internet culture, Participatory Panopticon refers to the proliferation of photographic and video content accessible through the World Wide Web and other Internet sources to the point that it can be utilized as an up-to-date, authoritative source on all human activities. The term was coined in this context by futurist Jamais Cascio, co-founder of Worldchanging, to describe how the personal data of multiple individuals can be synthesized into a collective whole. An alternative term for this concept is Participatory Big Brother.

Several technologies have recently emerged as examples of the concept. Among these are Google Street View, a feature of Google Maps which provides comprehensive photography of several cities, and Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth, which can combine multiple pictures taken of a single location from the Web into a single, representative 3D reconstruction.

[edit] Modern Definition

Whether the internet is surveillant after the manner of the panopticon cannot be answered by accounts solely interested in the attempts of the government or corporations to get to know us better via the internet. This is because the panopticon does not simply use information to know us, but it diffuses information to create us. If the internet is panoptic, it must serve as an "institution" that maintains social control through physical control of the body in space and rhetorical control of what is subjective. As Mark Winokur asks, "Does the Internet encourage a pro-social uniformity in its citizens?" [5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Panopticon: Government And Privacy In The New Millenium
  2. ^ The New Panopticon:
    The Internet Viewed as a Structure of Social Control
  3. ^ Panopticon.com: online surveillance and the commodification of privacy. Industry & Business Article - Research, News, Information, Contacts, Divisions, Subsidiaries, Business Associations
  4. ^ bit-tech.net | Why Web 2.0 will end your privacy
  5. ^ CTheory.net

[edit] External links