Lecture notes
- We live in a network world where we are under surveillance.
- Surveillance creates paranoia
- Once anything is on the web it is almost difficult to erase.
- In a sense we all live like celebrities
- In return for a free web our privacy has become a commodity.
- The web interferes with your public and private space
- We must discover the true cost of the free web. It defines our public profile and invades our privacy.
- The web predicts your behavior.
- Converts your personal profile into data.
- Its hard to function without having a web ID. We always need an username to construct our ID.
- To sign up to a blog software you need to create an different email in order for the website to identify you.
- Were moving towards a controlled society.
- Watch Channel 4 documentary 'The watchful web' Episode 'The joys of CCTV'
- Dissolving the public/private/privatization of the public space.
- Ideas on a private identity and privacy diminishing.
- Monitoring of email, internet, browsing, phone calls, public spaces, movement etc. Linked to the preemption of a certain behavior.
- Destruction of public space by the privatization of public space.
- Big Brother is watching you- a society of control.
- Britain has the largest number of surveillance cameras. This number continues to rise in the post 9/11 and 7/7 age.
- It is estimated that if you live in a city you are captured on at least 300 cameras a day.
- Question to answer and reflect upon. What effect does this have on you/others?
- Our everyday lives are being constructed and invaded by a surveillance culture. This effects our privacy of our identity as the people behind the CCTV are watching our every move. What we would express as a 'free' life is almost certainly not a 'free' life as the government and web has the power to reconstruct our identities and forge us into people we may not be.
- Exemption is a major part in surveillance society. Amazon will predict what you like based on your last purchase.
Theorists: Society of control
- This is what Deleuze (1995) once referred to as the society of control.
- Surveillance and control operate to predict/preempt target and regulate. This is to produce certain behaviors and identities for us all.
- Michel Foucault 'Societies of discipline'
- Globalized Digital Media culture are usually analysed using Disciplinary society (Michel Foucault) and society of control (Gilles Deleuze)
- Discipline and punish. Foucault compares two systems of punishment, less then 100 years apart.
- Torture as a spectacle.
- Person as a punishment/discipline.
- Hospitals, Prisons and Schools are a place of disciplined control.
- Prison is a place of confinement and correction.
- Prison, correctional confinement and the timetable.
- Quote ' How the pencil model shifts from one of the 'spectacle' to 'discipline' through constant surveillance and making the prisoner productive through a timetable.
- Which system would you say we have today, one based on torture or on prison confinement? question to consider.
- Prison is based on the confinement of a convicts identity and the reformation of their self. Living in an controlled society they are constantly monitored by CCTV and taught how to better their identities to society's way of living. They are controlled by the masses and their outcome is defined by a disciplined/monitored punishment.
- Foucault argues that today, punishment is not by spectacle but surveillance.
- The idea of surveillance carry's on through to schools and hospitals confinement and a structured way of living.
- Research discipline and punishment using the model of panopticon.
- Foucault used the model of surveillance within the prison to articulate how power and control are constructed.
- For example how the penal model shifts from one of 'spectacle' to 'discipline' through constant surveillance and making the prisoner productive through the institution of a timetable.
- 6 AM rise, morning prayers, work, meal, school, recreation, work, reading of instructive passage, evening prayer, inspection then bed.
- Foucault says today that everyone lives in a panopticon.
- Panopticon is a form of a controlled society.
- Control of society is an idea we are trapped in the world of surveillance.
- Quote ' Deleuze says that Foucault was actually one of the first to say that were moving away from disciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. Were moving towards control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. (Shaviro, 2003: 31-32)
- Controlled societies are decentralized.
- Education as a corporation indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continues to control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over the corporation.
- Examples of control
- The attempt to find penalties of substitution and the use of electronic collars or tags that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours.
- Discipline of society to societies of control. Foucault to Deleuze.
- Discipline- immobility/enclosure - objectifies the body.
- Control- mobility/ environment - modulates the body.
- Individuals become dividuals- masses, samples, data, digital identity.
- Code- data doubles- with bio-metrics you are a password.
- An inter-mixture of discipline and control.
- There is a constant struggle and tension between both poles, disciplinary society linked to governance trying to wrest power back into a centralized body and control society linked to rhizomic decentralized network attempting to escape culture into a rigidified model.
- Research Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002)
-How does this relate to both theories?
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