Panopticism

Abstract: This article explores the new modalities of visibility engendered by new media, with a focus on the social networking site Facebook. Influenced by Foucault’s writings on Panopticism – that is, the architectural structuring of visibility – this article argues for understanding the construction of visibility on Facebook through an architectural framework that pays particular attention to underlying software processes and algorithmic power. Through an analysis of EdgeRank, the algorithm structuring the flow of information and communication on Facebook’s ‘News Feed’, I argue that the regime of visibility constructed imposes a perceived ‘threat of invisibility’ on the part of the participatory subject. As a result, I reverse Foucault’s notion of surveillance as a form of permanent visibility, arguing that participatory subjectivity is not constituted through the imposed threat of an all-seeing vision machine, but by the constant possibility of disappearing and becoming obsolete.

Abstract: The article takes its point of departure in one limited and consciously selected aspect of Michel Foucault's use of Jeremy Bentham's concept of `Panopticon': in his book Discipline and Punish, the aspect of surveillance, and the emphasis on a fundamental change and break which presumably occurred in the 1800s from social and theatrical arrangements, where the many saw the few, to modern surveillance activities where the few see the many. It is maintained that Foucault contributes in an important way to our understanding of and sensitivity regarding modern surveillance systems and practices, which are expanding at an accelerating rate, but that he overlooks an opposite process of great significance which has occurred simultaneously and at an equally accelerated rate: the mass media, and especially television, which today bring the many — literally hundreds of millions of people at the same time — with great force to see and admire the few. In contrast to Foucault's panoptical process, the latter process is...

Abstract: This study demonstrates how the metaphor of the panopticon, a particular prison structure that renders prisoners self-monitoring, offers a useful way of understanding the mechanisms that inculcate an unrealistic body ideal in women. Foucault's notion of panopticism and a critical approach are used to show how textual mechanisms in two issues of Shape magazine—a women's fitness glossy—invite a continual self-conscious body monitoring in women. An analysis of two panoptic mechanisms, “The Efficacy of Initiative” and “Feeling Good Means Looking Good,” is supplemented with a discussion of Foucault's notion of confession/shame, and specific features of Shape's discourse are analyzed for their panoptic content.