I have realized I spend a lot of my time online. I participate in online communities, I do social networking and work online. Internet is one of the main sources of information to me. So when there is something wrong going on with my broadband, I am about to panic. I had look at myself in the mirror and admit, that I could hardly live without Internet. Take TV away from me, take my mobile phone, but please do not take my Internet! :-)
My advent rue with Internet began for 7 years ago when I realized Internet is here to stay and it definitely will change societies around the globe. I have made up my mind to dig a little more around Internet as a medium and cyberspace as the new arena for the public discourse. It ended up with my master thesis "Internet as a source of power".
Every time I think about Internet, it brings Panopticon to my mind.
In the end of XVIII century J. Bentham presented the project of the institution of control - it was a simple mechanism that could be used in jails, schools, factories, etc. The mechanism called Panopticon was meant to secure good and effective power and control. Panopticon was designed to ensure surveillance.
The idea behind Panopticon was simple: to see without being seen.
Later on Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) invoked Panopticon as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and its pervasive inclination to observe and normalize. Foucault says that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the school, the hospital, the factory and the army have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon.
The new communication technologies / channels are extension and transformation of the functions Panopticon was designed to. Those technologies can support proliferation of power and control, and they are free from physical and material restrains of Bentham’s Panopticon.
Based on information technology, it is neither jail, nor factory, but some kind of social formation takes over the role of disciplining and hierarchical machinery. The technological system in the wired society is planned in such a convenient way that it succors centralized and covert system of inspection, surveillance, control and documentation of social acts.
Countless databases, networks, increasing from day to day the number of information about needs, interest of individuals and social groups, transactions they make, actions they take – this is just a massive memory, that allows analyzing people. Just take a look at one of the trends: COUNTER GOOGLING – you Google people names and instantly get more personal information than you'd ever be able to capture with traditional face to face contact in an entire life-time.
Wired society is the society where citizens are naked.
I look at all traces I leave online - aren't we all living in the modern cyber Panopticon?
Tags: Internet, power, Panopticon, Bentham, Foucault, cyberspace, wired society
