Are schools panoptic?

Schools are often understood by social researchers as panoptic spaces, where power is exercised through constant surveillance and monitoring. In this paper, I use Foucault’s notorious account of the Panopticon as a point of departure for a detailed empirical investigation of the specificities of surveillance in schools. Drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in a primary school, I argue that how surveillance actually operated in this context diverged from the panoptic programme in two crucial ways: surveillance was (i) discontinuous rather than total, and therefore open to resistance and evasion, and (ii) exercised through sound and hearing as much as through vision

The concepts of surveillance and sousveillance: A critical analysis

The concept of surveillance has recently been complemented by the concept of sousveillance. Neither term, however, has been rigorously defined, and it is particularly unclear how to understand and delimit sousveillance. This article sketches a generic definition of surveillance and proceeds to explore various ways in which we might define sousveillance, including power differentials, surreptitiousness, control, reciprocity, and moral valence. It argues that for each of these ways of defining it, sousveillance either fails to be distinct from surveillance or to provide a generally useful concept. As such, the article concludes that academics should avoid the neologism, and simply clarify what sense of surveillance is at stake when necessary

Pervasively Distributed Copyright Enforcement

In an effort to control flows of unauthorized information, the major copyright industries are pursuing a range of strategies designed to distribute copyright enforcement functions across a wide range of actors and to embed these functions within communications networks, protocols, and devices. Some of these strategies have received considerable academic and public scrutiny, but much less attention has been paid to the ways in which all of them overlap and intersect with one another. This article offers a framework for theorizing this process. The distributed extension of intellectual property enforcement into private spaces and throughout communications networks can be understood as a new, hybrid species of disciplinary regime that locates the justification for its pervasive reach in a permanent state of crisis. This hybrid regime derives its force neither primarily from centralized authority nor primarily from decentralized, internalized norms, but instead from a set of coordinated processes for authorizing flows of information. Although the success of this project is not yet assured, its odds of success are by no means remote as skeptics have suggested. Power to implement crisis management in the decentralized marketplace for digital content arises from a confluence of private and public interests and is amplified by the dynamics of technical standards processes. The emergent regime of pervasively distributed copyright enforcement has profound implications for the production of the networked information society

Dance Music and Creative Resilience within Prison Walls: Revisiting Cebu's Dancing Prisoners

Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality vis-à-vis Appadurai’s “global ethnoscapes” as frames, I argue for a techno-cultural dimension which brought forth the phenomenon of the “dancing inmates,” an argument against the charge of Filipino colonial mimicry of a Hollywood popular entertainment. Albeit the inmates’ dance routines indeed depict Foucault’s “docile bodies” in his analysis of the modern prison, as pointed out by critics, I am inclined to show how the internet mediation through social media networks awakened a culturally imbibed dance and musical character trait vis-à-vis the jolly cultural disposition of Filipinos. Thus, I view these characteristics as existential responses, hence, ‘creative resilience,’ to the inhuman incarcerating conditions of the prison life through using the art of dance with the aid of media technology. I argue on the role of the internet as the prisoners’ avenue to the outside world that was strategically deprived of them as a form of punishment, and the role of the internet as their last frontier to freedom and to realize their human potentials

The cathedral and the bazaar of e-repository development: encouraging community engagement with moving pictures and sound

This paper offers an insight into the development, use and governance of e‐repositories for learning and teaching, illustrated by Eric Raymond's bazaar and cathedral analogies and by a comparison of collection strategies that focus on content coverage or on the needs of users. It addresses in particular the processes that encourage and achieve community engagement. This insight is illustrated by one particular e‐repository, the Education Media On‐Line (EMOL) service. This paper draws analogies between the bazaar approach for open source software development and its possibilities for developing e‐repositories for learning and teaching. It suggests in particular that the development, use and evaluation of online moving pictures and sound objects for learning and teaching can benefit greatly from the community engagement lessons provided by the development, use and evaluation of open source software. Such lessons can be underpinned by experience in the area of learning resource collections, where repositories have been classified as ‘collections‐based’ or ‘user‐based’. Lessons from the open source movement may inform the development of e‐repositories such as EMOL in the future

Surveillance and sousveillance on Facebook: Between empowerment and disempowerment

It seems there is no end to the growth of social media. Facebook, in particular, enjoys its hegemonic position as the leading social networking site, with more than one and a half billion global monthly active users throughout 2015. 71 per cent of all adult Internet users in the United States have used Facebook in 2014, which constitutes 58 per cent of the entire U.S. adult population. The website has permeated many aspects of social, cultural, and economic life. It has equipped its users with new ways of online social interaction, governments with new means of communicating policies with the public opinion, and businesses and advertisers with a platform for reaching consumers faster and on a broader-than-ever scale. David Lyon, the leading scholar of international surveillance studies, observes: "Facebook has quickly become a basic means of communicating – of 'connecting', as Facebook itself rightly calls it – and is now a dimension of daily life for millions" (p. 35).The effect of social networking and social media on mass popular culture of the modern world is undoubtedly immense. What is less clear, however, is the normative value and nature of Facebook. From its appearance on the Internet, the website has been an object of criticism pointing to the modern paradigm of individuals' lives being constantly exposed to the public gaze. The increasingly complex and decreasingly intelligible architecture of the globalising "technoscape" have created new means of surveillance. David Lyon (1994) has been at the forefront of this line of thinking, arguing together with Zygmunt Bauman that modernity brought about the rise of a new Panoptic "surveillance society". Lyon sees Facebook as an exemplary modern surveillance system, designed for the purpose of collecting data about its users and turning it into commercial profits. The revelations about the global surveillance of Facebook users by the U.S. National Security Agency, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, seem to be a case in point. The international uproar that followed inspired many to reflect critically on the nature of social networking sites and to question their safety

In/Visible Bodies. On patients and privacy in a networked world

In the networked world, privacy and visibility become entangled in new and unexpected ways. This article uses the concept of networked visibility to explore the entanglement of technology and the visibility of patient bodies. Based\ud on semi-structured interviews with patients active in social media, this paper describes how multiple patient bodies are produced in the negotiations between the need for privacy and the need for social interaction. Information technology is actively involved in these negotiations: patients use technology to make their bodies both visible and invisible. At the same time technology collects data on these patients, which can be used for undesired commercial and surveillance\ud purposes. The notion of visibility by design may infuse design efforts that enable online privacy, supporting patients in the multiple ways they want to be visible and invisible online

Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors

This is an essay about law in cyberspace. I focus on three interdependent phenomena: a set of political and legal assumptions that I call the jurisprudence of digital libertarianism, a separate but related set of beliefs about the state\u27s supposed inability to regulate the Internet, and a preference for technological solutions to hard legal issues on-line. I make the familiar criticism that digital libertarianism is inadequate because of its blindness towards the effects of private power, and the less familiar claim that digital libertarianism is also surprisingly blind to the state\u27s own power in cyberspace. In fact, I argue that the conceptual structure and jurisprudential assumptions of digital libertarianism lead its practitioners to ignore the ways in which the state can often use privatized enforcement and state-backed technologies to evade some of the supposed practical (and constitutional) restraints on the exercise of legal power over the Net. Finally, I argue that technological solutions which provide the keys to the first two phenomena are neither as neutral nor as benign as they are currently perceived to be. Some of my illustrations will come from the current Administration proposals for Internet copyright regulation, others from the Communications Decency Act and the cryptography debate. In the process, I make opportunistic and unsystematic use of the late Michel Foucault\u27s work to criticise some the jurisprudential orthodoxy of the Net