The Panoptic Gaze
... head of the whole division monitoring him then it’s his supervisor, or his “team manager”, a great term used by big business in an attempt to make their employees feel more like a team and not a bunch of replaceable pieces. (Anyone that would by into the stupid team idea probably didn’t need to be tricked.) These different levels of supervision create an atmosphere of constant surveillance; an atmosphere where it is almost impossible to be comfortable. And if it’s not the people above you that will get you it might be the people around you. Performance evaluations and peer reviews now make it dangerous to slack off in the company of others. All these factors lead to the creation of the panoptic gaze, which is many forms of surveillance intersecting with one another and creating a network of constant scrutiny. If you believe that you are constantly being watched then you never have time to screw around and you are then forced to monitor yourself which in turn makes real surveillance almost unnecessary. The panoptic gaze is a powerful tool used to keep people uneasy and therefore, or so it is thought, motivated. The panopticon also keeps members of a society in line and maintains order. When you see the signs that read, “These Premises Are Monitored by Video Surveillance” it is impossible to know if that’s true but the fact that it might be will stop nine out of ten people from doing anything wrong. An example that just became relevant is that downloading music might get you sued, but you don’t know for sure. Thousands of people have stopped downloading illegally since the law suits started. That is putting fear right into your bedroom; you can’t even work on your computer without being monitored. But there are even more powerful instruments of control used by the state to keep the country in order. Possibly the most powerful device is law. Not law in the sense of right and wrong but more in the sense of legal and illegal. Law as defined by what the state allows you to get away with and what the state deems worthy of imprisonment. The clearest way to see law as a tool of the powerful is to observe the simple fact that the rich are acquitted of crimes more often than the poor. The explanation for this is that the rich have influence over people in a position to help with matters of the law (politicians, judges, cops, etc.) and they can afford better lawyers. Those two facts clearly show that some members of society, the powerful ones, are actually above the law. How many times does the media report on some high ranking politician driving drunk and killing someone but the death was ruled accidental an...