The advances in contemporary surveillance techniques have, for the past three decades, been bound... more The advances in contemporary surveillance techniques have, for the past three decades, been bound with the development of cheap and efficient computational machines. These rapid changes in new media have made the task of theorising surveillance pertinent once again. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1995) is a seminal work in this respect. Although Foucault himself focuses on the development of disciplinary techniques in the 18th and 19th centuries, which has led some scholars to declare his model of identity formation to be outdated, his work is nevertheless more relevant than ever. A distinction must be made between Foucault’s historically contingent examples and the generalisable theoretical apparatus he builds on their basis. Both the panoptic principle and disciplinary methods espoused by Foucault can be located at the heart of digitally augmented surveillance (dataveillance) and they have been, moreover, significantly amplified. This does not mean that nothing has changed in the actual practices of surveillance. The panoptic principle no longer depends on architectural enclosures, and has proliferated outwards into public spaces and homes. Disciplinary techniques, too, are far from gone, but there has occurred a shift from the body, as their primary locus of application, to the individual’s ‘digital double’, inhabiting virtual spaces. Moreover, computer databases make possible a new procedure of normalisation by way of forecasting: the individual is not disciplined in real time but is predicted in advance, based on the digital trace left by his activities.
The advances in contemporary surveillance techniques have, for the past three decades, been bound... more The advances in contemporary surveillance techniques have, for the past three decades, been bound with the development of cheap and efficient computational machines. These rapid changes in new media have made the task of theorising surveillance pertinent once again. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1995) is a seminal work in this respect. Although Foucault himself focuses on the development of disciplinary techniques in the 18th and 19th centuries, which has led some scholars to declare his model of identity formation to be outdated, his work is nevertheless more relevant than ever. A distinction must be made between Foucault’s historically contingent examples and the generalisable theoretical apparatus he builds on their basis. Both the panoptic principle and disciplinary methods espoused by Foucault can be located at the heart of digitally augmented surveillance (dataveillance) and they have been, moreover, significantly amplified. This does not mean that nothing has changed in the actual practices of surveillance. The panoptic principle no longer depends on architectural enclosures, and has proliferated outwards into public spaces and homes. Disciplinary techniques, too, are far from gone, but there has occurred a shift from the body, as their primary locus of application, to the individual’s ‘digital double’, inhabiting virtual spaces. Moreover, computer databases make possible a new procedure of normalisation by way of forecasting: the individual is not disciplined in real time but is predicted in advance, based on the digital trace left by his activities.
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