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| Christof·Demont·Heinrich·University of Colorado, Boulder·USA |
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| When the Panopticon goes online |
| Charting the geography of power, control and surveillance in cyberspace |
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| What is the relationship between "real" world structures of power and cyberspace? What sort of space is cyberspace being made into? With what potential implications? This paper attempts to engage these questions while drawing heavily upon the rich theoretical tradition of the field of cultural and human geography as well as from the work of Michel Foucault. The paper opens with an historical analysis of cyberspace and an engagement of metaphors of space, place and landscape as they are seen to apply to cyberspace. It then moves to an overview of what the author views as the three major discourses on cyberspace: the utopian, the dystopian, and the ambivalent. An analysis of questions of power and control in cyberspace as they relate to what Lawrence Lessig has called its underlying architectural "code" follows. The author also examines specific examples of cyberspatial surveillance and discusses them within the context of Foucault's notion of panopticism. Finally, the paper addresses some of the implications of the current state of surveillance and hierarchy of power within contemporary cyberspace. The author concludes that an expansive regime of surveillance boasting immense capabilities of storage, recall, cross indexing, speed and clarity simply not possible before is emerging. This regime – which is in fact an intensification and expansion of an old panoptic schema – creates the specter of a computerized Panopticon with the capacity to span both time and space in far more wide reaching and insidious ways than ever before. While critics must be careful not to deliver sweeping claims that cyberspace embodies this or that universal characteristic, it seems clear that many of its contemporary tendencies are pushing us closer to an ever more penetrating panoptic regime. |
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