Panopticon

Freidrich Engels explores Michel Foucault’s ideas about the organisation of social space through the relationship between social and spatial mobility. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1945), Engels suggests that social class is dialectically linked with one’s ability to freely navigate urban space, arguing that the city space of industrial Manchester during the ‘hungry forties’ worked as a mechanism of the capitalist state to control the socio-spatial movement of the working…

In America By Design, David Noble argues that the rise of technology is synonymous with the rise of corporate capitalism. The book title prescribes technology as a constructed capitalist plan to exert dominance over American society. Noble adopts a Marxist cultural determinist view that empowers humans (in this case corporations) as agents in technological development, thereby rejecting the technological determinist view which sees humans as malleable consumers, and technology as an external…

Mill and Foucault both use the concept of freedom and liberty in their writings to demonstrate the different power dynamics. Mill has a distinct perspective of social tyranny among a liberal structure. Foucault explains the ways in which we facilitate and enforce power through discourse. While their two views give a different lens of power, I would argue that they give a similar perspective on the ways in which a collective society maintains power. Both Mill and Foucault establish a critical…

Criminal justice and crime have both been theorised in various different methods. These various methods include crime and punishment, the theory of inspection and surveillance, criminal typing and the theory of the normal and pathological. One method where crime and criminal justice has been theorised is through the theory of crime and punishment. One of the most significant theorists being Cesare Baccaria (1764). Baccaria was a leading theorist in what is known as the Classical School and he…

without Secrets,” Peter Singer asserts that we live in an age of technology, an age where the government can easily access the personal data of its citizens, whether it is voluntarily given to the government or not. Singer compares our world to a “Panopticon,” a theoretical environment that allows for one-way observation (Singer 85). In today’s world, people are under constant, intrusive surveillance, yet, paradoxically, those same people under observation are able to use technology to view the…

Because of this, there was little room for a mistake because we felt as though we were constantly being watched. In Foucault’s Panopticism, he explains how many schools are organized along the Panopticon structure, along with prisons and hospitals. It is explained that how a person who is constantly aware that they are being watched may act in ways they would not have acted in a private setting. Being monitored- in all settings tends to make people…

does not matter if they are only fighting for their rights, the legality of any action id to be judged by the military which can have them jailed. Therefore people live in the environment of fear and death. The second tool used is the power of panopticon/surveillance. As described in the first question, an unknown ratio of people from 30 million are deployed for this purpose and whether the informers are around or not, the people are afraid to condemn any government action due to the horrific…

Uber is an American international transportation network company. The company operates the service through the Uber mobile app, through which consumers with smartphones submit a trip request that is then forwarded to Uber drivers who use their own cars to take the consumer from point A to point B. Since the launch of Uber many companies have copied the business’s ideology (e.g. Lyft, Sidecar, BlackJet etc.) and that growing trend is called Uberification. The problems stated by NELP in the…

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains how disciplinary power is used to produce subjects who internalize power and as a result, regulate themselves as their own jailors. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon model is brought up as a prime example of a form of technological power used in the mid- 19th Century to generate this disciplinary power. The model uses a tower which is placed at the center of a circular prison building. From this tower, the wardens and guards are able to view any prisoner at…

I travel the St. Louis-Boston air route on an almost weekly basis. At times Boston Transportation Security Administration (TSA) stops me. Every time I am being stopped, I end up exhausted, confused and even a bit shaky. As I get prepared to cross the TSA security checkpoint the rush starts. I tend to feel somehow naked. A sensation I believe might be shared with those who actually did strip naked to show TSA screeners that they were not carrying a bomb, as John Brennan did in 2012. Once all…