Panopticon

Surveillance is everywhere. Even if people do not notice, it is all around us. When creating my surveillance diary and analyzing the results, I noticed several differences in surveillance depending on the locations and settings that I was in. While I was at work, most of the time there was always the feeling that you were being watched, and by the information collected, it was made clear to me that it was not just a feeling. On the other hand, while being in places such as York University for…

family, school and the workplace would receive rehabilitation while in prison, to function properly in society. French philosopher Michel Foucalt, in “Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison,” analyzed the famous model prison known as the Panopticon. The design of this prison was for prisoners to be observed at all times by being unaware of when they were being watched, with the goal of instilling self-discipline into the prisoner as if they were under constant surveillance, so they can…

Michael Foucault believes that modern society is a society of surveillance, and his predictions could not be more accurate. Through the intention of producing something as lighthearted as entertainment, we have relied on the panoptic order to secure this gaze. This essay will use Foucault’s theory of the ‘panoptic’ order to discuss the ways the, ‘Funniest Security Camera Moments of All Time’ from America’s Funniest Home Videos uses found footage comedies to define our modern day visual culture.…

dangerous problem, and that is the panopticon that is known as the bank. The banks of today are created in a way to be both a physical panopticon, an authoritarian panopticon, and a financial panopticon. The banks of the United States and the rest of the world control the actions of our life in a way that seems to infiltrate everyday activities and actions. Not only do banks form a physical panopticon because of their high-level surveillance, but they form a panopticon of financial control…

point of infinity.” What Berger means by this is it is a focal point perspective, and it’s what the artists want the viewers to see. The arrangement has involvement with hierarchy, and also relates to Foucault and the surveillance system in the Panopticon. This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor (Foucault 2). The syndics are the ones who keep the lowest in check, and let the…

The panopticon, as a structure or as a mechanism, as Foucault refers to it as, is completely different from its counterpart the dungeon. Instead of depriving the inmate it allows the inmate to always see their captors structure, however they are not able to see…

Michel Foucault, in “Panopticism,” explains that panopticism it can be very beneficial; however, it would lead to tyranny at the end. Plato talks, in “Allegory of the cave,” about the experience in the point of view of a prisoner chained in dark caves and his experience after that. Brian Doyle, in “Joyas Voladoras,” describes a variety of creatures that have hearts, explains their adaptation and their properties; demonstrates that humankind have a unique type of heart - the locker of all the…

SURVEILLANCE AND THE PANOPTICON 499 Accordingly, we accept the various encroachments upon civil liberties because they are critical to equip our governments with the tools and the data to eliminate the risk of terror and other violent criminality. Yet, these are the same tools and data that can be used against us, and we are complicit and cheer the overt, unashamed construction of a police state, differentiated from a democratic regime by the sheer scale of surveillance. One is not free to…

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…

During the entire “Panopticism” essay the one picture which every reader had put in their mind was the picture of the central prison tower being circled by hundreds of cells. Throughout the entire essay Foucault keep giving example of prisons and towns which were in quarantine to prevent the spread of diseases. However at the end of the essay Foucault made a conclusion which may have caught a few people of guard; he asserted that prisons are not the only structures which symbolize or work like…