Panopticism Vs Privacy

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Panopticism vs Privacy
In the twenty-first century, privacy is dead, and the disillusionment by the government fractured. With all the information leaking to the public, people are awakening to the authorities slowly taking control and utilizing new methods to spy on them. An early blueprint of this idea, the Panopticon is a tall tower capable of spying on everyone at once, while the targets have no way of identifying the spies. In Michel Foucault's article, “Panopticon,” from his book, Discipline and Punish, he explores the invasive nature of the modern state and the outlandish measures they take to perform surveillance, raping the citizens of their freedoms. Foucault’s description of the Panopticon mirrors the encroaching nature of the …show more content…

In his article, the centralized tower requires a heavy infrastructure, making it infeasible in practice. He describes the cells as having “axial visibility” and “lateral invisibility,” making every action of the prisoner visible while ensuring that the prisoners cannot see the actions of the captors (Foucault 999). In reality, this kind of surveillance is impractical since it requires a great deal of architectural planning and drains economic resources. Despite the heavy monitoring of citizens, crime does not stop. As Kietzmann and Angell suggest, “only one crime is solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras” and implementing these methods “leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness” (Kietzmann and Angell 135). Although the government spends millions of dollars investing in new surveillance methods, the inefficacy of their approach cannot justify this great expense. If an individual intends to commit a crime, not even the heaviest surveillance in the world can hinder them. Although heavy surveillance rarely prevents criminal activities, it successfully creates what Saladdin Ahmed deems a “totalitarian space,” which he defines as “a unified, flat, transparent control [that] can best be described as panoptic,” the result of “spatial technologies” (Ahmed 2). Essentially, a totalitarian space seeks omniscience and omnipresence, instilling fear into the people, and …show more content…

"Panopticism and Totalitarian Space." Theory in Action, vol. 11, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 1-16. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3798/tia.1937-0237.1801.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 6th Ed. John Schilb and John Clifford. Making literature matter: an anthology for readers and writers, Boston, MA: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2015. 998-1000. Print.
Kietzmann, Jan and Ian Angell. "Panopticon Revisited." Communications of the ACM, vol. 53, no. 6, June 2010, pp. 135-138. EBSCOhost,

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