Panopticon Definition

The government is always watching to ensure safety of their country, including everything and everyone in it. Camera surveillance has become an accepted and almost expected addition to modern safety and crime prevention (“Where” para 1). Many people willingly give authorization to companies like Google and Facebook to make billions selling their personal preferences, interests, and data. Canada participates with the United States and other countries in monitoring national and even global communications (“Where” para 2). Many question the usefulness of this kind of surveillance (Hier, Let, and Walby 1).However, surveillance, used non-discriminatorily, is, arguably, the key technology to preventing terrorist plots (Eijkman 1). Government

A Surveillance Society by Thompson and Hickey is about how public surveillance is everywhere, looking at everything, and is never turned off. First, the PATRIOT Act was passed by Congress shortly after 9/11, and has allowed the government to start watching people. Ever since then the U.S. has increased its use of cameras in public places. Today, just about everywhere businesses and shoppers are, there are cameras. High-tech surveillance devices are more prevalent across populated areas. Corporations, agencies and even individuals monitor social areas with surveillance. With today’s technology, cameras are able to scan images and identify people. Organizations regularly share databases, swapping personal information. Some are opposed

From a towering architectural manifestation stationed in Saint Petersburg, a television surveillance system labeled “Big Brother,” and the everyday global positioning system located in handheld devices, the Panopticon in all forms has been an attempt at total surveillance. In order to understand the literal and metaphorical panopticons as concepts of total surveillance, we must first define their most prominent features and components, which include geography, cost and benefit. This can be done by examining the generality of the Panopticon’s nature, the concept behind the making, how people can better understand concepts, and both the literal and metaphorical forms of the panopticon.

The use of surveillance is becoming increasingly evident around the world. Surveillance is carried out in many different forms from simple methods such as video surveillance to more complex methods such as call and browser monitoring. Although it might seem that surveillance is undeniably convenient when pursuing a criminal or preventing a terrorist attack, it is often misused and many are beginning to question why there

This article argues that surveillance is becoming increasingly normal across the USA and the world and that this is changing our freedom and security. It mentioned that globalization and migration of people from different countries some who threaten our country has made this surveillance more necessary to protect our citizens from theorists acts. The article uses examples of video-surveillance to make this case and to argue for both stronger resistances to calls to make our human rights more flexible in a risky time.

Almost everything someone does in today’s society is under surveillance. It does not matter if you are surfing the web, going to the store, or even driving a car; it is almost always under surveillance. While Michel Foucault does not specifically talk about modern surveillance technology in Discipline & Punish (1977), much of the primitive technology that he does talk about is directly related with today’s surveillance technology. Michel Foucault believes that societal surveillance began to take effect during the 1600’s to control the masses. Many modern surveillance technologies reflect Foucault’s ideas helping to categorize, differentiate, hierarchize, and exclude people from the masses.

Surveillance is not a new thing. In fact, espionage, tracking, and sleuthing were part of society ever since 5000 B.C. But in the rise of the modern era, the idea of surveillance in the public eye serves as a controversial topic of discussion. People everywhere complain about the existence of security cameras, government tracking, and the right to privacy. Such problems, however, are not due to the sudden discovery of surveillance, but the modern abuse of it. Seeing the disastrous effects of over surveillance from George Orwell’s 1984, the public rightfully fears societal deterioration through modern surveillance abuse portrayed in Matthew Hutson’s “Even Bugs Will Be Bugged” and the effects of such in Jennifer Golbeck’s “All Eyes On You”. The abuse of surveillance induces the fear of discovery through the invasion of privacy, and ensures the omnipresence of one’s past that haunt future endeavors, to ultimately obstruct human development and the progress of society overall.

Foucault once stated, “Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests” (301). By this, he means that our society is full of constant supervision that is not easily seen nor displayed. In his essay, Panopticism, Foucault goes into detail about the different disciplinary societies and how surveillance has become a big part of our lives today. He explains how the disciplinary mechanisms have dramatically changed in comparison to the middle ages. Foucault analyzes in particular the Panopticon, which was a blueprint of a disciplinary institution. The idea of this institution was for inmates to be seen but not to see. As Foucault put it, “he is the object of information, never a subject in

When information is posted online for example, individuals are now aware that CSIS has full control over that information—and can get a warrant essentially whenever they want. This can lead individuals self-governing what they say, what they post—and in a way—the way they think. Based on Michel Foucault’s research in his article Discipline and Punish, CSIS’s mode of surveillance is much like the notion of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. The panopticon is an idea for a prison where there is a guard tower in the centre of a circular room. Around the perimeter of the prison is where the cells are.

When the government or law enforcement has reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior, different methods of obtaining information and evidence must be used in the interest of preventing violence and decreasing crime. This is seen in the actions of Persistent Surveillance Systems, a security company run by Ross McNutt that utilizes military grade cameras, flown on planes two miles in the sky, to gain a bird's eye view of a region and any crimes that might occur. A controversy over privacy surrounds these methods; people tend to be uneasy with the feeling that they are being watched all the time, and it is easy to draw a parallel to Orwell’s all-seeing Big Brother. However, the cameras overhead are not forcing citizens to conform to a single mold or limiting freedom, they are monitoring for crime, or used to retrace the path of a crime after it occurs, as is the case in a murder in Juarez, Mexico. In this case, the police brought Persistent Surveillance the location of a body, which had been shot with no witnesses. McNutt and his team used the photos taken that day to locate the murder at the time it happened and trace the killer’s path to their current location, in less than a day. Upon further investigation the

Mass surveillance is a word that has been thrown around every so often in the last few decades, especially ever since George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although this book was released over 60 years ago, some aspects of the book are seeming to become true in the United States, and other parts of the world today. The idea of mass surveillance isn’t so taboo anymore, as there are several programs ran by sovereign countries around the world which monitor their domestic citizens, as well as citizens and leaders of other foreign countries. With all of our technological communication advances since 1949, this age of information is only going to get more severe, and more tracking and monitoring will be done. The biggest offender of doing

Thus, for the CJS to ensure that the offenders are well trapped for their arrest, they have to use all that is available ranging from social media, CCTVs, databases and people. This creates a nexus of surveillance in which a few are used to observe many referred to as synopticism. This in turn results to a surveillance assemblage whereby many people who would otherwise not be under scrutiny now become under scrutiny. ( Martin AK et al

Schools, factories, hospitals and prisons today resemble each other, they are fit into the format of a panopticon structure, examining pupils, workers, patients and prisoners at any given time. When we enter a building, make a phone call, purchase with a credit card, or visit a website, we are being watched, if not recorded, analyzed. The increasing use of surveillance by commercial and government entities caused the technology to become omnipresent in our lives. With the name of

The article discusses on how the technology being used in surveillance has advance accompanied by the role of psychology in surveillance. In addition to CCTV surveillance, we now have the surveillance of information, which can be called as the dataveillance. Society constantly used social media without knowing that the social media companies holds all of their information. The article argues that there are complex relationships between our psychology, emotion, and behavior with surveillance that influences and shapes our individuality and social life.

A Panopticon is a cylindrical prison where all prisoners’ cells face a central watchtower with the intention of instilling the idea of constant surveillance in prisoners. Panopticism stems from the same model which refers to the idea of constant surveillance in any setting especially in today’s world of technological pervasiveness. The panopticon represents the double edged sword that is present to society as authorities want to exert more control on the individuals. Between giving up privacy for safety and private lives that endanger all, the need for regulation of behavior gets stuck in the middle of it all. The movie Citizen Four (Poitras, 2014) highlights that any shred of privacy that we thought we had has been lost in the “shadowy labyrinths