The Helios Biblios Hour : Panopticon with guest George C. Mallinckrodt

Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher, and social reformer, published his plan for the Panopticon penitentiary in 1791. Essentially, it was for a building on a semi-circular pattern with an 'inspection lodge' at the center and cells around the perimeter. Prisoners, who in the original plan would be in individual cells, were open to the gaze of the guards, or 'inspectors', but the same was not true of the view the other way. By a carefully contrived system of lighting and the use of wooden blinds, officials would be invisible to the inmates. Control was to be maintained by the constant sense that unseen eyes watched prisoners. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to be private. Not knowing whether they were watched, but obliged to assume that they were, obedience was the prisoner's only rational option. Hence Bentham's Greek-based neologism; the Panopticon, or 'all-seeing place'.In what ways, and in what contexts, might electronic surveillance display panoptic features? No consensus exists about either question. Different analysts focus on different aspects of panopticism that reappear or are reinforced by computers: the invisibility of the 'inspection', its automatic character, the involvement of subjects in their own surveillance, and so on. Equally, different analysts emphasize different spheres of operation of the putative panopticon: in workplace organization and especially, electronic monitoring, in criminal records and policing, in consumer behaviour and transactions, and in the myriad administrative activities of the state.The persistence of panoptic principles in contemporary society has been noted by those studying general trends in social control, such as Stanley Cohen, and by others examining specific practices involving new technology in policing.