Tag Archives: panopticon

Watching Each Other: Foucault’s Panopticon and Confessional in Social Media

Everyone knows when we post online, we’re being watched. The NSA, the FBI, Google, Facebook, Apple, Visa, ModCloth–they monitor our online activities for patterns that indicate danger or that can teach them to market directly to us; they monitor for … Continue reading

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Social Media & The Digital Confessional: Outlining a long post

Tentative Thesis: The internet, especially social media, can be read as Foucault’s confessional-turned-panopticon, in which people expose and put into language (text, pictures, videos, music) their experiences and stories, the process of which makes them subject those experiences to social discourse, … Continue reading

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Ki Mae Heussner, “Digital Confessionals: Tweeting Away Your Vices”

This article explores the use of social media as a way to motivate/shame yourself into meeting a goal, like losing weight, monitoring your spending, or quitting smoking. The author looks at one man who lost weight by tweeting his caloric intake, … Continue reading

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Richard Joyce, “Internet Surveillance: A Virtual Panopticon?”

This short blog post appears to be part of Richard Joyce’s blog for a course at Bowdoin, and, similar to this blog, he’s thinking through some of his own thoughts in relation to what he’s read. The thrust of his thinking … Continue reading

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Jenny Hollander, “YouTube Video of Matthew Cordle Latest to Post Murder ‘Confession’ on Internet”

Last year, Because I said I would, a website that helps people post a commitment they are making, posted the above video on YouTube, featuring Matthew Cordle confessing to drunk driving the wrong way on a highway and killing a … Continue reading

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Indhu Rajagopal, “Does the Internet shape a disciplinary society? The information-knowledge paradox”

Rajagopal’s essay considers the relationship between information and knowledge through a Foucauldian framework. This was a complex, dry argument, so I’m going to try to communicate what I understood, and what I might continue to think about. In the knowledge/power … Continue reading

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Simon Copland, “The Culture of Confession”

This short blog post on the Moonbat (Big ideas, big politics.) makes the same, limited move that much of what I’ve read before does: Copland begins with a nice little summary of Foucault’s confessional, and then turns to apply it … Continue reading

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Mitchell McInnis, “Conversation with a Dead Man: Foucault on Facebook and Confession”

Turning from panopticism (which I’m still unsure is a word) toward Foucault’s confessional, I look at Mitchell McInnis’ blog post from Hoboeye.com, which seems to be a possibly-temporarily-defunct online publication about wandering. I annotate this because the beginning raises an interesting … Continue reading

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Tom Brignall III, “The New Panopticon – The Internet Viewed as a Structure of Social Control”

I would have never guessed that this article was post-9/11, but according to this vaguely-identified HTML version of it, it was published in 2002. I don’t know why no one has considered the panopticon and the internet more recently, but … Continue reading

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Andrew Hope, “Panopticism, Play and the Resistance of Surveillance: Case Studies of the Observation of Student Internet Use in UK Schools”

This 2005 article is based on a study of UK post-primary schools: the researcher observed and interviewed students, teachers, and staff about methods of monitoring what students do on school computers and students’ resistance of these methods. He begins by … Continue reading

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