Winokur, Mark. ‘The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace.’
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=371
The article The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace by Mark Winokur describes the internet as having aspects both for and against being described as panoptic. Winokur outlines some of the aspects of Michel Foucault’s Panopticism that are ambiguously displayed on the internet and the type of discourse that is allowed by codes to highlight the necessity for a new linguistics of cyberspace. The author does not think Foucault’s Panopticism can be mapped directly onto the internet as although subjects are monitored and to an extent segregated there is room for creation and alteration of space and discourse. The issue is important as the virtual layer of reality becomes totalizing the arenas of becoming and personal production could be dominated by control from the central tower or perhaps elastic and recoded by evolving discourse.
Panopticism as developed by Michel Foucault begins with allusion to Jeremy Bentham’s prison the Panopticon. A Panopticon has a central tower surrounded by cells in a circular wall that all face the central tower in interests of segregation and control. Each cell is open to observation by the tower and the tower is well lit and visible to each cell but it is impossible to know if there is a guard in the tower and if so, if that guard is currently observing any given cell. The uncertainty but constant potential of observation forces each individual to internalize a behavioural guard. This little bit of power internalized by each subject becomes a network of power relations that is economically cheaper than funding enforcement and infrastructure of external control. Panopticism is associated with the separation of individuals and internalization of power structures and behaviour guards that causes people to produce themselves as useful and efficient types of individuals. The system asserts control through the distribution of power throughout society and expectations of conformist behaviour.
The author claims the internet has a similar structure to the Panopticon whereby information of increasingly spread networks all funnels it’s way back to webmasters and servers which act as the central tower that may control what content passes through them. The internet is discussed in relation to five aspects of Panopticism in the article: gaze, spaciality, totality and discourse. The gaze of the internet is considered bi-directional, both the economic internet overlords and the users gaze upon each other and the content of the internet. The spaciality of the internet is likewise ambiguous as users may connect from nearly any geographic location but many of the locations visited online are popular among different users and often revisited repeatedly by each user making them homogeneous. The author considers the internet as a usually monadic experience where individuals connect with the internet while alone or singularly interfaced with the computer. Further individual activities are often surveilled be it by spyware, advertisements or webmasters’ filters. This surveillance and segregation is similar to that of panopticism and the internalization of policing self and others for conformity and efficient control. The encompassing quality of modern technology makes virtuality or access to virtual reality totalizing. Society and bodies are enveloped in the framework and technology of the internet. Totality constructs the framework of what can be thought of or done by containing the apparati of information flows and relationships. The internet is totalizing as it is its own reality with constructs and apparati inherent to itself. For Foucault discourse is the driving structure of possibility. It is not possible, or very difficult, to think outside the framework for discourse similar to how it is difficult to think without using the framework of language.
Winokur suggests the code language that makes up the internet is a type of discourse, and one that differs from regular language in that the commands it defines can create a (virtual)reality where words in day to day life represent an aspect of reality but do not create the thing that is described per say. There are multiple types of code language that can work together in the same virtual space that suggests a flexibility to such dialogue. Winikur would like to see a change in discourse and terminology to understand the internet that reflects the differences between a code language that may produce material meaning and general language of signifiers that does not. The ability to create through code offers up opportunity to participate in creation and dialogue of discourse online. As discourses (guards) work through subject’s corporeal bodies in the production of controlled and efficient selves, dialogue with discourse could produce different types of individuals.
The argument is convincing to me in the sense that the internet is becoming totalizing and all encompassing and the networks of control on the digital body are carried into real life. Taboo behaviours in social networking sites that are not condoned by participants in the network of power can result in job loss and interpersonal backlash. The internet is also convincingly monadic as people seem to engage personally with their computers and have personal relationships with their profiles and connections. As far as discussing a new linguistics of cyberspace goes, specific terminology of modern and developing concepts is an ongoing and valuable endeavor. However I do not feel as though the general population of users engages with the coding of cyberspaces and perhaps that the relationships between users and how spaces are utilized would be a more relevant area of description.
Questions to Consider:
To what extent do users dialogue with discourse in everyday internet use and specifically with ‘Codes of Cyberspace'? Could a different or expanded definition of codes to include interpersonal behavioural schemes be useful?
To what extent do we monitor each other and ourselves as a distributed power network in CyberSpace?
Additional Resources:
Panopticon
Panopticism
Michel Foucault
I tend to agree with the criticism that the understanding of code is not widespread enough to constitute a discourse (I don't know code). However, do you think that the internet generates other discourses?
ReplyDeleteTwitter is an interesting convergence of the dialogue of SMS (140 characters) with the broad connectivity of the Internet. I would argue that interaction on Twitter constitutes a type of discourse that we don't see elsewhere precisely because of the uniqueness of that convergence. We have to express ourselves 140 characters at a time, but we are talking to people who aren't necessarily the same type of people we'd text (if we are even talking to a specific person at all). Associated with this discourse are peripheral elements, such as the ability to "retweet" someone else's tweet, which republishes the tweet under your feed, for your followers to see, while still attributing it to the original Twitter user. Most of these peripheral elements of discourse originated organically from within the community. Retweets are now a firmly-entrenched, well-supported feature on Twitter, but they began as an informal practice that Twitter adopted as an official feature when it realized how popular they were.
ReplyDeleteThis discourse lends itself to a type of panopticism. Unlike with Facebook, which has various degrees of privacy, one's Twitter feed is either entirely public or entirely private. If public, one has no idea who is reading one's tweets. Combine this with the fact that tweeting, built upon the platform of SMS, is so easy to do, and tweets made in anger or under the influence have the potential to be much more damaging than a photo posted to Facebook. People have been fired or otherwise resigned for conversations conducted over Twitter or even for single tweets.