What Is A Panopticon?

Initially, in my first pieces of academic writing for this class, I was striving to summarize as much as possible in as little space as possible. While this does provide the reader with significant context, it usually leaves them questioning “so what?”. I had to understand that the reader wasn’t reading my essay/journal to make up their own thoughts about the text but rather to understand my interpretation/opinion towards its significance. In my first journal, I summarized the idea of the panopticon in depth including multiple quotes. I wrote only one line: “What’s interesting is how much of a panopticon’s power is based simply on possibility; that the mere chance that one is being watched instils enough fear and control and allows a single panopticon to be effective as a means of …show more content…
With the main focus of this course being to “transform[ing] ways of thinking about and engaging with communities and the world, my writing did little to nothing to achieve that making it, for all intents and purposes, fairly useless. Using this knowledge, I wrote my next journal with a different, more suitable frame of mind. I introduced the topic (in this case: the three processes of discipline) and described it briefly for a few lines for essential context. After the bare essentials were done with, I jumped immediately into analysis in the fourth sentence analyzing Foucault's idea of the “disciplinary society” in the line “This disciplinary society is in essence a bureaucratic utopia in which those in authority have unlimited power and resources to control and observe any particular population group”. I used my own understanding of Foucault's ideas and offered my own theory as to what the disciplinary society actually is. This made my writing have actual purpose relatable to the essential goals of this