Essay Basis
For my essay I have decided to look at the mass media as a giant panopticon, I want to investigate into what extent the media effects the life's of the people that are subjected to it. This constant surveillance of the world has had a mass effect on peoples behaviour. This idea that we are being watched and filmed on a daily basis has changed peoples everyday behaviour. For instance, CCTV is a way of controlling the nation, people automatically correct their behaviour when they know they are under scrutiny. The thought of being watched can make people act un naturally in other cases. Reality TV shows influence everyday people to act irrationally, and effectively play up to the cameras in order to be noticed and seek fame. I want to investigate to what extent the media has controlled the nations behavior by using these panoptic techniques.
Research Plan
In order to build a solid case I will research aspects of the media that work as a panopticon, Now adays there are many different methods that we come across in everyday life without even noticing. Here are some of the things I will look into as a starting point.
Examples of Panopticism in the Media
- Big Brother - essentially a physical panopticon
- We live in Public - Tv documentary with a Big Brother concept but more Raw. Perfect example of how the media can really effect the lives the public. In some cases break people down and ruin them.
- Bill Boards - Use of woman and the gaze linked. - Alters woman's appearance, could make people feel bad about themselves.
- Mobile Phone Camera technology - Gave the power of the media's panopticon to the people.
- Century of the Self
- Social Networking
Scholar Writings / Documentary
- Panopticism Disipline and Punish, Michael Foucault, (1971)
- The Look , R Coward, (2000)
- Century of the Self, Adam Curtis
- Edward Bernays
- Sigmund Freud
- Gary Marx
- David Lyon
- Mark Poster
- Ways of Seeing John Berger
Quotes
"permanent visibility assures the automatic functioning of power" because the prisoner alwasy felt he was being watched, and so he didn't have to be". Foucault
"he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (1977a: 203).
Taken from a Essay on Surveillance and Panopticism
Information technologies act on identities (sometimes independently of perception) and literally transform them into what Bruno Latour (1990) has called ‘immutable mobiles.’ Simpler to arrange and control than actual bodies, digital identities are stable, transferable, transportable and combinable entities. These are kinds of data images or data shadows. Roger Clarke (1993) calls these entities ‘digital personae’, I have taken to calling them ‘databased selves’. More than an identity, the databased self possesses a limited agency. It may act (supposedly on our behalf), granting us entry to the gated community, and it may be acted upon by others in turn (to deny us entry). It may have integrity as with medical information protected by law or it may sell itself to the highest bidder. Databased selves also exhibit the capacity for growth as new data is assimilated over time and by virtue of the systems in which they are embedded, they are capable of long-term memory, risk-assessment, and the anticipation of the future. What makes databased selves different from our actual selves is that databased selves are more easily accessible, observable, manageable and predictable than we are. Databased selves actually meet the Benthamite ideal better than the disciplined bodies of the Panopticon.
Mark Poster (1992) has perhaps developed the clearest articulation of what a Deleuzian reading of Foucault along these lines might entail. Poster understands the shift to control societies in terms of a kind of superpanopticism which he argues does not operate via external force or internalized norms but rather in terms of discourse and the linguistic properties of digital computation. Crucially, the story of the inmate is not abandoned so much as sublimated by Poster. At the core of the superpanopticon is the computerized database; a sorting machine that organizes and produces subjects. As David Lyon nicely summarizes:
the subject is multiplied and decentered in the database, acted on by remote computers each time a record is automatically verified or checked against another, without ever referring to the individual concerned... computers become machines for producing retrievable identities (Lyon 2001: 115).
In decentering or doubling the subject (dividualizing in Deleuze’s terms), we are lead, as Lyon continues to trace the story, to understanding surveillance in terms of simulation (Bogard 1996). We do not produce our databased selves, the databased selves produce us.
How could this be? The icon for superpanopticism is neither the eye nor the camera but the database or even better the form: the marketing survey, the census form, application forms, medical forms, etc... The operation that occurs at the interface between a subject and a form under superpanopticism is interpellation. We are interpellated by the form and the electronic infrastructure of which it is a part. As Poster writes:
the unwanted surveillance of personal choice becomes a discursive reality through the willing participation of the surveilled individual. In this instance the play of power and discourse is uniquely configured. The one being surveilled provides the information necessary for surveillance. No carefully designed edifice is needed, no science such as criminology is employed, and no complex administrative apparatus is invoked. In the superpanopticon, surveillance is assured when the act of the individual is communicated by telephone line to the computerized database... a gigantic and sleek operation is effected whose political force of surveillance is occluded in the willing participation of the victim (Poster 1992: 94).
The diagram of superpanopticism is not a diagram of surveillance in the traditional sense, no one is watching us and we do not perceive ourselves as being watched. We simply go about our business while our databased selves are assembled, scrutinized and evaluated in much more detail than the inmates at Foucault’s Mettray prison ever experienced (Foucault 1977: 293- ).
If Foucault emphasized the importance of the gaze... it was always with a view to other problems: first, of the standardization of multiple techniques – the concrete operations – for partitioning space and ordering temporal relations (i.e. imposing form on the multiplicity of human conduct), and second, of linking these operations to the forms of discursive knowledge which direct the gaze and give it its object (336-37).
to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers (Foucault 1977a: 201).
Foucault argues that the Panopticon is not after-all like the plague stricken town (an important point in light of Elden 2003). In the latter case, power “separates, it immobilizes, it partitions; it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is reduced in the final analysis... to a simple dualism of life and death” (Foucault 1977: 205)
It can be claimed that through surveillance cameras the panoptic technology of power has been
electronically extended: our cities have become like enormous Panopticons (Lyon, 1994;
Fyfe and Bannister, 1998; Tabor, 2001). The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Cambridge: Polity Press
it has been argued that the Panopticon is replaced by a ‘post-Panopticon’ (Boyne, 2000: 300), or an ‘electronic superpanopticon’ (Lyon, 2001: 108)
Boyne, R. (2000) Post-Panopticism. Economy and Society, 29: 285-307. Lyon, D. (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
It has been argued that the real ‘superpanopticon’ exists in electronic environments – in the ‘word
wide web of surveillance’ (Lyon, 2001). The ‘webcams’ distribute images to the audience
on the Internet connecting ‘local gazes’ with the global community (Green, 1999)
Green, S. (1999) A plague on the Panoptician: surveillance and power in the global
information economy. Information, Communication and Society, 2: 26-44. At:
The major effect of the Panopticon is, in Foucault’s words (1977: 201), ‘to induce in the
inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automate functioning
of power’. The emphasised meaning of visibility is perhaps the most obvious and often
recognised panoptic principle.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. London: Penguin
Books.
The gaze of a surveillance camera is ‘calculated to exclude’ (c.f. Munt, 1995)
Munt, S. (1995) The lesbian flâneur. In D. Bell and G. Valentine (eds.) Mapping Desire:
Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 114-125
‘The private actions of the gazed upon become the public spectacle of the gazers’
(Hillier, 1996: 97).
Hillier, J. (1996) The gaze in the city: video surveillance in Perth. Australian
Geographical Studies, 34: 95-105.
In the panoptic prison, ‘the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so’
(Foucault, 1977: 201)
The inmates face ‘the constant torture of the random but ever possible gaze’ (Ainley, 1998: 90)
Ainley, R. (1998) Watching the detectors: control and the Panopticon. In R. Ainley (ed.)
New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender. London: Routledge, 88-100.
women are more likely to be targeted for ‘voyeuristic reasons’ (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 114
Norris, C. and G. Armstrong (1999) The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of
CCTV. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
'as a chance to display oneself under the gaze of the camera’ (Ernst, 2002: Surveillance & Society 1(3) 302-461)
Ernst, W. (2002) Beyond the rhetoric of panopticism: surveillance as cybernetics. In T.Y.Levin, U. Frohne and P. Weibel (eds.) CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. ZKM Centre for Art and Media: Karlsruhe, 460-463.
One doesn’t have here a power which is wholly in the hands of one person
who can exercise it alone and totally over the others. It’s a machine in
which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those
over whom it is exercised. (Foucault, 1980: 156). Link with We live in public?
Foucault, M. (1980) The eye of power. In C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault. Sussex: Harvester
Press, 146-165.
‘we live in a society that prefers the sign to the thing, the image to the fact’ (Weibel, 2002: 219).
Weibel, P. (2002) Pleasure and the panoptic principle. In T.Y. Levin, U. Frohne and P.
Weibel (eds.) CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big
Brother. ZKM Centre for Art and Media: Karlsruhe, 207-223.
Points
Under panopticism, you are never outside of the gaze of authority because we have all been trained to watch each other. Sort of human programming over the years, in effect we are all puppets of world being played against each other by a higher power.
The panopticon of social media both weakens and empowers the mob. Weakens it because people lose anonymity. But empowers it becuase it becomes much easier to identify and marshall disapproval against people who act outside of social norms.
Not only does physical enclosure make constant monitoring technically feasible, but also self-discipline begins only when the prisoner cannot imagine a means of escape. Once there is nowhere to hide, it makes more sense to conform but as soon as the prison walls are gone, the system becomes more difficult to manage.
Panopticism, as a totalizing system, fails without an equally sophisticated cultural apparatus for reminding citizens that they are being watched
What the capacity to feign conformity suggests is that self-policing can not arise from the threat of retribution alone since such retribution depends on the visual detection of acts of transgression. While the Panopticon makes all acts visible (in principle) it cannot distinguish between acts that conform to the rules and acts which pretend to conform to the rules. If visual detection is not possible then there can be no threat of retribution and the simple panoptic machine fails. Note that as a simple penalogical model the machine also fails if it rewards conformity rather than punishing transgression. In either case, conformity can be feigned to gain a reward or evade punishment.
Being under the constant watch of the world influences people to carry out actions they would not usually do. They may either play up to the camera which encourages the subject or they will be more reserved and up tight depending on what context it is in.
In cities, the routine of surveillance makes the use of power almost instinctive: people are controlled,
categorised, disciplined and normalised without any particular reason
The gaze of a surveillance camera is ‘calculated to exclude’ (c.f. Munt, 1995). A camera
represents total one-way-ness of the gaze by making it impossible to look back. One may
see the cameras but an eye-contact with it is impossible. There is no ‘mutual’ gaze. It
would feel ridiculous to try to flirt with a surveillance camera. Its objects are constantly
seen but with no possibility to ‘respond’ or ‘oppose’ the gaze
it can be argued the female body is still an object of a gaze in different way
than the male body. This also applies to women being viewed through a surveillance
camera. While men are more likely to be targeted in general, women are more likely to be
targeted for ‘voyeuristic reasons’ (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 114). ‘The offensive
gaze’ belongs to men.
Web Resources
Structure
- Introduction into the essay
- Explain panopticism and Foucault
- How has this theory been carried through to the present.
- CCTV - Works in many ways. Corrects Behaviour, Ability to make people feel safe and in danger, Works differently on different people. Voyeuristic.
- We live in Public - No privacy what so ever. Caused destruction, people played up to the cameras in an attempt to seek fame and recognition. Turned people into mad men, people that once came in full of love left with hate, it turned creative people into cabbages and also provoked aggression.
- Went to the next level when the creator set up a similar experiment with his girlfriend in which they filmed their whole lives. This lead to the destruction of their relationship and turned an $80millinon man bankrupt.
- Mobile phone camera technology, and webcams/ recording devices. Has changed the world wide web, people are posting videos on a daily basis limiting everyones privacy, creating this digital world.
- Every form you sign and information you key in is building a digital replica of oneself. Making people easily accessible The web knows what your interested in and influences you with adverts, playing to your weaknesses. Society is all seeing and knowing, the more advanced technology gets the more they will know about us.
- Social Networking - Made everyone else's lives public all you need to do now is google someone and you can probably find information on them. This limits peoples activity with fear of it being made public or in other cases Increases it in a bid for attention.
- These panoptic techniques are seen in advertising too, the use of the Gaze is used to appeal to both men and woman playing with our unconscious desires. Influencing what we buy, how we look what we NEED, (don't really need). Bill Boards with scantily cladded woman in sexy positions change the way we feel about ourselves and others, woman desire to be more like them and in turn change the way they look, men aspire to get woman like that or buy products that are associated. In effect we are being controlled buy this all watching consumerist society that monitors analyzes and influences our everyday lives.
- Techniques and theorys of Bernays / Freud.
- Conclusion Link in all theories as one giant panaopticon that influences each and everyone of us on a subliminal level and on a conscious level.
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