[Week 8_2] Surveillance.

The Panopiticon of Bentham is a useful rhetoric for Foucault to describe the functions of knowlege/information power in modern social systems. In conditions of unverifiable surveillance for order, people start self-monitoring according to the rules that have been set by the man in the central watchtower (or, said to be there). On the Internet, since surveillance can occur in the code-level, such notions have a more direct connotation. However, it should be noted that the true core of Foucault's Panopticum lies in the voluntary participation of the surveilled. It is not the oppressor versus the oppressed, but the rule-setter and the rule followers. Furthermore, the rule-setters could be the system itself, instead of some evil dictators. The whole society may be voluntary prisoners of the Panopticon, so to speak. It's not how we topple the man in the center, but whether we can critically reconsider the familiar rules of the information and communication pattern that we call our own. Lyon talks about four kinds of surveillance theory: state, bureaucracy, techno-logic, and political economy. In lieu with Foucault, I think the 'voluntary' cultural dimension should be added to them.

For Zuboff, the disappearing human interaction is a key threat for the management of the modern information society that tends to rely heavily on the non-humanized information skills. Not for humanitarian reasons, but because it isolates managers from the still 'humane' realities of the organization. Good thing to mention, but a little outdated in a age when information technology has already taken the direction of IMs and personal networks. I wonder what Zuboff would say to those developments where information has developed to enhance the interpersonal networks rather than the social 'machine'. I don't mean to say she was wrong, but that there is a certain portion of unignorable self-purification in play since we are still living in human bodies.