Surveillance, right

• Surveillance

  Involves monitoring behaviour for the purpose of control; observing people to gather data about them > regulates their behaviour

  • late modern society involves CCTV to gather data
• Foucault: the panopticon

  1. Sovereign power in pre-modern society = monarch exercised physical power over people’s bodies, punishment was a visible spectacle, e.g. public execution
  2. Disciplinary power became dominant form in 19th century > seeks to govern body and mind through surveillance
• Foucault

  Panopticon = prison design where prisoners' are visible to guards, but guards are not visible to prisoners

  • not knowing if they're being watched > prisoners constantly behave
  • surveillance turns into self-surveillance > becomes invisible inside the prisoner
• Foucault

  Argues other institutions (schools, mental institutions) follow this pattern > disciplinary power has now infiltrated every part of society > bringing effects to the human soul
• Synoptic surveillance, Mathiesen

  Argues in late modernity there's an increase in top-down surveillance and surveillance from below

  • Synoptic = everyone watches everyone else, includes media scrutiny of powerful groups or filming wrong doing by police
• Evaluation of Mathiesen and Foucault 


  McCahill argues this doesn't reverse the establishment of 'hierarchies of surveillance'
• Surveillance assemblages, right


  Haggerty and Ericson = surveillance tech now involves manipulation of digital data rather than physical bodies

  • trend to combining different technologies into surveillance assemblages, e.g. CCTV footage can be analysed using facial recognition software
  • able to find out who the criminal is
  • not always accurate > may target POC > over-policing