Essay on We Are Big Brother's Reality Television Star

1984, a novel by George Orwell, represents a dystopian society in which the people of Oceania are surveilled by the government almost all the time and have no freedoms. Today, citizens of the United States and other countries are watched in a similar way. Though different technological and personal ways of keeping watch on society than 1984, today’s government is also able to monitor most aspects of the people’s life. 1984 might be a dystopian society, but today’s condition seems to be moving towards that controlling state, where the citizens are surveilled by the government at all times.

Foucault in a few short words does not like the implementation of the panopticon or the idea of

In order to understand the power structures present in her description of life as a low-wage worker in Nickel and Dimed, we need to first understand Michael Foucault’s philosophy regarding discipline and surveillance. Rather than perceive power and discipline as strictly political and authoritative, Foucault believes that society is structured in a way in which constant observation disciplines us to abide by social norms and expectations. This constant surveillance is omnipresent in the sense that observation occurs in all realms of society, from education to sexuality. To further explain this idea of disciplining through constant inspection, Foucault describes Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican, a type of prison in which

“The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power,” Foucault declares; indeed, much knowledge can be ascertained by “penetra[ting] into men’s behavior” (379).

It has been more than seventy years since the release of George Orwell’s 1984, a novel that imparts a lesson on the consequences of government overreach. However, today that novel reads like an exposé of government surveillance. Privacy and national security are two ideas competing for value on a balance; if one is more highly valued, the other carries less weight. Government desire to bolster national security by spying on its own citizens-- even the law abiding ones-- is what leads to the inverse relationship between civil liberties and security. In times of a perceived threat to the nation, national security becomes highly prized and people lose privacy. One case is terrorist attacks. 9/11 caused an understandable kneejerk reaction in Americans to bolster protection. Some of the the measures taken were observable, like greater security at airports, but others attempted to increase national security in a more intrusive way. Privacy should be more highly valued than national security, and America has reached a point where that is no longer true.

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.

The final sentence reveals the Panopticon’s true purpose: a political tool. The previous sentences break down the previously configured definition of the Panopticon and with this final piece, Foucault finishes redefining the term. Understanding that limiting the definition of the Panopticon would eliminate its functionality, Foucault chooses to interpret it loosely without assigning a set meaning to it. Thus, allowing the concept of the Panopticon to be used in other subject areas and not just as a tool for prisons. John Berger also addresses a similar issue through the example of artwork in his text, “Ways of Seeing”. Berger’s description of present day reproductions of images from the past explains how past processes can find use in the present through interpreting the essence of its meaning. More specifically, Berger believes that we can assign several different uses to objects of the past because the information that they provide remains the same even if the actual, physical object does not. “It is not a question of reproduction failing to reproduce certain aspects of an image faithfully; it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image,

Surveillance has been a popular theme used by the entertainment industry in the last two decades. Films like the Bourne film series (2002-2012), Equilibrium (2002), V for Vendetta (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), The Hunger Games film series (2012-2015) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) each use and play with this sense that the world is being watched by mysterious, dangerous, and clandestine men in black. Reality television programming, including shows like Big Brother and Survivor also use the idea that everyone is being watched. There is always an eye in the sky. Every action is captured, monitored, and recorded. In the reality of the 21st century, this has become true as shown with the NSA leaks revealed

Foucault's "Panopticism" (1979) is a careful piece that talks about how a panoptic framework would impact culture, society, the political, and individuals. Foucault describes panopticon is to “induce the inmate a state of conscious and visibility that assures the automatic function of power.” Foucault mentions, surveillance has a lasting effects, regardless of the fact that it is discontinuous in its activity; that the perfection of power ought to render its real unneeded practice. The Inmates are in a dominating circumstance that they are them-selves the bearers. Foucault (201, 202–3) also mentions that "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and knows it, expect responsibility regardless of the constrains of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon

     The Panopticon, a prison described by Foucault, “is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing” (321, Foucault). This literally means that in the formation of the panopticon those who are being seen can not see one another and the one who sees everything can never be seen. That is the most important tool of the panopticon. Foucault makes this assumption about today’s society by saying that we are always being watched whether we know it or not. One always keeps an eye over their shoulder as a

In Michael Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”, the late eighteen century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's model of Panopticon was illustrated as a metaphor for the contemporary technologies of mass surveillance.

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

This interest as I call it was the need of privacy to be respected by individuals and governments. Foucault’s idea of “Panopticisim” might be too much to be conducted in a free environment but in the prison setting as he described is ideal. This helps keep the peace and establishes a reason for the inmates to behave. The thought that just individuals who are accomplishing something incorrectly have things to cover up and subsequently motivations to think about protection, is that it settles in two extremely dangerous messages, two ruinous lessons, the first is that the main individuals who think about security, the main individuals who will search out security, are by definition terrible individuals. This is a conclusion that we ought to have a wide range of explanations behind maintaining a strategic distance from, the most essential of which is that when you say, "some individual who is committing awful things," you presumably mean things like plotting a terrorist assault or taking part in savage guiltiness, a much smaller origination of what individuals who wield power mean when they say, "committing awful things." For them, "committing awful things" regularly implies accomplishing something that is purposely hidden in order to protect their public

Foucault looks at public torture as the outcome "of a certain mechanism of power" that views crime in a military schema. Crime and rebellion are akin to a declaration of war. The sovereign was not concerned with demonstrating the ground for the enforcement of its laws, but of identifying enemies and attacking them, the power of which was renewed by the ritual of investigation and the ceremony of public torture.[5]

The government plays a major role in dystopic stories and novels, and as these stories start to unfold, one can see the flaws in which how government works and how if effects the rest of society. In the Minority Report, written by Philip K. Dick, the mechanisms of the government’s systems begins to show different flaws when surveillance is use to determine the pre-crime of major crimes, and what happens to their citizens once a verdict is reached. Any type of Government surveillance can do more harm than good, due to the fact they invade the privacy of the people, in some cases resulting in giving innocent people unfair and unlawful punishments, and also because it can fail to protect and create an aspect of fear among their citizens.