Reading: Foucault "Discipline and Punish"
According to Foucault, the culture that we live in prioritizes each individual completing certain expectations of them; following the rules of society, focusing on their own issues, and ignoring anything that contradicts what we already know. He states that "our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance," which ultimately signals a difference between spectating and surveilling. To spectate means that you watch the movements of another person while to surveil means to watch for something that you expect to already happen. We prioritize the negative, gruesome aspects of society, which leads to incredibly popular sites, television and radio alike, the focuses on surveilling and analyzing the negative aspects of human culture. In this culture, we are watching the actions of others, but the only time that we actually see one another is when someone acts outside of what is expected of them. Foucault also argues the condition of the panopticon, where "we are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine." We discussed this in class where people provided their opinions on whether we actually live in a panopticon, and I discussed the condition that we are part of our culture. We are not simply consumers that have other things happen to them, but, as Jenkins argues, we are in a participatory culture where our actions influence others. In this panopticon, we are unaware of our influence on each other during the course of surveillance of each other without seeing outside of ourselves.
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