Amazon
Amazon is an American international commerce company and the worlds largest online retailer. The site went online in 1995 and has become the biggest source for internet shopping across the globe. It sells everything from books, DVD's and computer games to health and personal care items and musical instruments. Amazon gives a chance for people with very busy lives to purchase goods within the comfort of their own home. It creates the pleasure of making speedy purchases dissolving the hassle of travelling into town to shop.
As customers come in droves to purchase items on Amazon the regulation of customers is being produced. This is done in order to preempt and target specific identities for different customers. When you make a purchase on Amazon all your personal details are required, this involves your address, card details and email. After the item is purchased the customer will constantly be inundated with emails and adverts relating to their last purchase. So under the surveillance of Amazon a disciplinary society is produced in order to survey the patterns of customer consumption and market new products. This results in predicting and controlling customers desires. This structure of surveillance subsides with the Panopticon model. Poster (1994 p101-102) comments
'Foucault sees the Panopticon as a technique of controlling large numbers of people in a particular institution. Foucault relates it back to a description of an quarantine during an epidemic. He observes the Panopticon to be an enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded.' Poster (1994 p101-102)
Amazon is an organisation that reflects the Panoptic model. It uses its technique of surveying customer consumption to control large numbers of people within their institution. It records all activity made and surveys every action taken to regulate identities for each customer. With the introduction of computers and data collection the principles of a disciplined society expand to a new level. Poster (1994 p103) comments
'With the mechanisms of information processing (the bureaucracy using people; the computer using machines), the ability to monitor behavior is extended considerably. In the electronic age, spatial limitations are bypassed as restraints on the controlling hierarchies. All that is needed are traces of behavior; credit card activity, traffic tickets, telephone bills, loan applications, welfare files, fingerprints, income transactions, library records and so forth. On the basis of these traces, a computer can gather information that yields a surprisingly full picture of an individuals life. As a consequence, Panopticon monitoring extends not simply to massed groups but to the isolated individual. The normalized individual is not only the one at work, in an asylum, in jail, in school, in the military, as Foucault observes, but also the individual in his or her home, at play, in all the mudance activities of everyday life.' Poster (1994 p103)
Amazon isolates each customer and regulates their identity according to their consumption. Through the collection of personal details Amazon customers become a consumption of online behavior. Among this Amazon customers become isolated through a disciplined society.
Poster, M. (1994). Prison & Surveillance. In: Poster, M Foucault, Marxism & History. Cambridge: Polity Press. p101-103.
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