I generally don’t like to write forced blog posts. Instead I prefer to let my inspiration come naturally, which is why I 
guess I haven’t posted in a while…no inspiration…ha! But this weekend I had a chance to check out the movie Law Abiding Citizen and it took me back to one of my Visual Communication classes which centered on the idea of the Panopticon. The Panopticon was a prison model proposed by Jeremy Bentham back in the late 18th century (see image). It was designed to enable round the clock but invisible surveillance of prisoners via a tower central to a circular building. A lot of the movie Law Abiding Citizen was filmed within the walls of the Eastern State Penitentiary here in Philadelphia which was constructed with a similar idea of prison surveillance to the Panopticon.
Well what has this got do with anything was the question I first wondered upon encountering this concept. It seemed like a concern of architects not communication students or professionals. However, upon delving more into Foucault’s ideas, I realized that the concept of the Panopticon is much more pervasive than I ever would have thought. I don’t feel like I can do justice to Foucault’s ideas on Panopticism in this short post, but go here if you’d like a more in-depth understanding. Suffice it to say, Foucault was concerned with the manifestation of discipline in a society under constant surveillance or rather a society under perceived constant surveillance as one of the key features of this prison model was that the prisoners could never know when they were being watched.
The Panoptic system is present in our every day lives through camera surveillance, computer technology (think cookies on your computer) and in organizational settings to name a few. It is obviously a form of control and discipline that is very effective in first-world countries particularly. What’s interesting to me is that within Foucalt’s ideas is a commentary on how powerful vision and visuals are. That a society can be disciplined simply by the threat of being watched speaks wonders to the power of vision to imprint upon us what it wants us to do, see or be. The implications of this are far-reaching especially as we go deeper into a world of technological wonder and complexity.
