Panopticon

Abstract: This article examines how interaction by means of computer-mediated communication (CMC) affects the operation of both status differentials and power relations. The authors attempt to provide a corrective to the dominant assessment, particularly within social psychological analyses, that CMC tends to equalize status, decentralize and democratize decision making, and thus empower and liberate the individual user. This emphasis contrasts with sociological critiques employing the Foucauldian metaphor of the panopticon, claiming that power relations can actually be reinforced in CMC. The authors argue that prevailing conceptualizations of influence and power within social psychology have tended to prefigure the more optimistic account, and outline a theoretical framework in which processes of “panoptic power” in CMC are given a more concrete social psychological foundation.

Abstract: This article presents a thoroughgoing critique of Fernie and Metcalf's perspective, that the call centre is characterised by the operation of an 'electronic panopticon' in which supervisory power has been 'rendered perfect'. Drawing on evidence from a telecommunications call centre the authors analyse the significance of emerging forms of employee resistance.

Abstract: In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks , Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon , and The Book of Negroes , to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

Abstract: In this article Michel Foucault’s method of writing a “history of the present” is explained, together with its critical objectives and its difference from conventional historiography. Foucault’s shift from a style of historical research and analysis conceived as “archaeology” to one understood as “genealogy” is also discussed, showing how the history of the present deploys genealogical inquiry and the uncovering of hidden conflicts and contexts as a means of re-valuing the value of contemporary phenomena. The article highlights the critical observations of present-day phenomena from which a history of the present begins, paying particular attention to Foucault’s concept of “dispositif” and his method of problematization. Foucault’s analyses of Bentham’s Panopticon, of the disciplinary sources of the modern prison, and of the technology of confession are discussed by way of illustration.