Study Task 3: Panopticism

Following on from the lecture and seminar on Panopticism, I'm going to look into Panopticism deeper, particularly in regards to the text 'Panopticism' in Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave McMillan. A modern example of panopticism in my opinion is social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, I'm going to correlate my theory with quotes from the text to hopefually back up my form.

What's interesting about modern social networking is we sign up to this willingly, no one forces us to. This is a contrast to early forms of discipline and surveillanc as mentioned in the text, such as Foucalt discussing the Black Death in the 1600's. We document our lives, pass all of our information, almost as a security measure, a form of social acceptance. This kind of social measure is mentioned by Thomas regarding the black plague, 'the name, age, sex of everyone notwithstanding his conditions;: a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call.' [THOMAS, 2000]  Sounds eerily similar to sites such as Facebook, just swap words such as intendants with mutual friends and strangers, and swap town hall with the internet and at a push, the entire world. Again, we sign up to this, this isn't a form of social control forced upon us but we sign up to this for a variety of social reasons.

An issue frequently raised in todays society is the handling of information, what information on the internet do we actually own, there was a huge uproar about the ownership of photos uploaded to Facebook and more recently photo-sharing facility 'Instagram'. Instagram basically own the photos uploaded to Instagram, as according to Facebook UK Policy director, Simon Milner ‘Our services are free to users but they don’t cost us nothing. We have to pay for it and the way we pay for that is advertising and that involves innovative use of the data people provide to us,’. 

This same ownership of data, and ultimate upper-hand once information is handed over stuck out to me from Thomas' text, 'Deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities - is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge, no other practitioner may treat ... no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note.' [THOMAS, 2000]

Looking at the concept of the Panopticon too, the architecture designed for inmates/patients being continuously observed, in an uncomfortable always lit environment, 'By the effect of the backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so manycages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly invisible.' [THOMAS, 2000]. The words which stand out to from this extract is "constantly visible" and the idea of The Gaze. Being watched and objectified, without having the same luxury back. Posts to our walls on facebook, status updates we write, information we share on the internet is constantly visible at all times. We're also not there, to back ourselves up or stop ourselves being objectified, we're behind a screen. We could be asleep in bed while someone on the other side of the world is objectifying us, I feel in this sense it's the same as the Panopticon, with the role of the watchmen being the individual reading our information on Facebook, and us playing the roll of inmate.