Part 4 - Coursework
I developed this exercise in this post.
Michel Foucault, in order to introduce his considerations on panopticon and panopticism, describes the sanitary measures, or rather, disciplinary measures, which, in the seventeenth century, were prescribed in order to contain a plague in a specific place.
It is all the more interesting to read this introduction today, in the midst of a pandemic, when we see that some restrictive measures imposed by various nations have not been very different from those conceived more than two hundred years ago.
All the initiatives derive from the exploitation of the emergency and are developed within the framework of a total and centralized control of the individual, with rules aimed at isolating everyone from everyone, in order to guarantee total discipline and the capillary exercise of power, by a single center of power.
Those who are considered "unrecoverable" (the plague victims) are not considered worthy of being checked: therefore, they are herded into an indistinguishable heap.
"The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream."
Thus we see the coincidence between a project to fight the plague and a project of an "ideal" society in which the result of the second is obtained through the fear of failure of the first.
In the context of the project of exercising power through the control, branding and segregation of the individual, the declination of Bentham's Panopticon architectural project develops. A construction intended for people ".... perfectly individualized and constantly visible ....".
All this is reminiscent of the scenarios of George Orwell's "1984" or Suzanne Collins' "Hunger Games".
In the digital age, the concepts recalled by the Panopticon could be compared to what was the development of the world wide web: the instantaneous circulation of multimedia information among everyone and everyone could lead us to think that there is, somewhere in the virtual world, a "panopticist tower" capable of observing everyone.
Actually, for many years huge violations of privacy through global systems of "observation" and digital recording have been hypothesized, investigated and reported: these are not imaginative or conspiratorial hypotheses, to the extent that the the ramification and pervasiveness of the web favors the enormous representation and circulation of information concerning the individual, which is then exposed to large-scale manipulation and abuse.
I also believe that in current context there are substantial differences between the "panopticist" world, where visual control is imposed on the individual, and the socials-based world, where the individual is the first to want to expose himself and be seen.
We are therefore faced with a paradox in the world of the web and socials, where the individual, being at the same time the subject and the object of communication, through the real-time exposure of personal information, is intimately convinced to be free. This is the same exposure that, imposed in the panopticist concept beyond utopian intentions, could have made the individual a slave.
