首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
     


THE PANOPTICON'S CHANGING GEOGRAPHY
Authors:JEROME E. DOBSON  PETER F. FISHER
Abstract:
ABSTRACT. Over the past two centuries, surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham's Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell's Big Brother; today, an electronic human‐tracking service. Functionally, each technology provided total surveillance within the confines of its designated geographical coverage, but costs, geographical coverage, and benefits have changed dramatically through time. In less than a decade, costs have plummeted from hundreds of thousands of dollars per watched person per year for analog surveillance or tens of thousands of dollars for incarceration to mere hundreds of dollars for electronic human‐tracking systems. Simultaneously, benefits to those being watched have increased enormously, so that individual and public resistence are minimized. The end result is a fertile new field of investigation for surveillance studies involving an endless variety of power relationships. Our literal, empirical approach to panopticism has yielded insights that might have been less obvious under the metaphorical approach that has dominated recent scholarly discourse. We conclude that both approaches—literal and metaphorical—are essential to understand what promises to be the greatest instrument of social change arising from the Information Revolution. We urge public and scholarly debate—local, national, and global—on this grand social experiment that has already begun without forethought.
Keywords:geofencing  geoslavery  gis  gps  human tracking  Panopticon
正在获取引用信息,请稍候...
正在获取相似文献,请稍候...
设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号