Dear Blog,
This was not my first time engaging with The Panopticon and Michel Foucault and I feel like you can never get enough of his writing and it ages so well in our technologically focused and repressive society. While reading this, I was thinking of Barthes and how we never skip the same passage upon rereading. I felt closely tied to this quote when reading this again: "Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance" (101).
In this quote, Foucault is making claims that our society prioritizes the surveying of others over other things. With the actual Panopticon, surveillance is done by the watcher in the watch tower and we abide by that surveillance whether we know someone is watching or not. Although there may not actually be someone in the watchtower of the Panopticon, but when we think about today's technology and how anyone and everyone can pull out their phone and film you, it's different but not. There are cameras everywhere, posted in front of every building and business but also cameras that can fit in our pockets.
It's interesting to think about the power we have given to surveillance, and surveillance done by others, strangers, our peers... We, as bystanders, have associated power with our devices that can document things the stationery cameras can't. I'm arguing that maybe the Panopticon exists in more ways than Foucault could've ever prepared us for. Not only are we aware that cameras are everywhere now and we cannot escape them, but also that any one person can also participate in the surveying. Maybe in the updated Panopticon, we still do not know who is in the watchtower, if anyone, but we know that anyone could be surveying us at anytime.
For a media example, I think of the social instances that have gone viral online because a bystander pulled out their phone and filmed it. I'm thinking of Amy Cooper, a white woman, who called the cops on a Black man, Christian Cooper, in Central Park who was bird watching. This occurrence, which may not have been surveyed and publicized had it not been captured by a bystander on their phone and posted online. Another example, is a more general one, but how when Black people get pulled over and start filming the interaction with the cop in case something goes wrong they have the video footage. In a way, the phone, the surveillance enacts a certain power dynamic that can makes cops uneasy that they're being watched. This gets at Foucault's original ideas about power and the power of surveillance, even the power of surveillance knowing that no one may ever see it, but just the possibility that someone might is enough to make someone act a certain way.
That's all for now. Signing off,
mg
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