“Panoptic visibility”. Surveillance culture of 21th century

Abstract

The paper discusses an emergence of the value system associated with the distribution of informational methods for controlling and surveillance in person’s everyday and social life nowadays. Accessibility of the informational technologies “democratized” practices of controlling and surveillance, destroying traditional hierarchical mode of these phenomenona. Situation of the post-industrial civilization is characterized by the ability for the state, corporations and independent agents to collect and process personal data to achieve sometimes obscure goals. It is argued that situation of “infocentrism” is not a unique feature of present era. Through analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic project, as being the most notably developed theoretical model, it is postulated that the key features of surveillance as such are “visibility” and “participation”. Despite the fact that in social imagination, through the works of fiction, surveillance is viewed as a violent intervention in private life of a person, the main form of it for the most members of society is self-surveillance. Still, technological progress couldn’t but influence the practices of controlling and, as a consequence, the ways of the people social interaction, that are constantly present in the digital space. In a society, where the culture of surveillance became reality, the person, state and corporations have a possibility to create homogeneous informational space, excluding people with the different ideas and values out of it. “Power to exclude” is considered to be a result of a tendency to objectify another person, as fundamentally valuable “Other”, in the digital dimension. The alike and other processes justify why surveillance, in its everyday manifestations, should not be neglected by researchers.