Panopticon Society

A post by kdawson on Slashdot uses the terms Panopticon Society, a term we might need to become more familiar with. The cause of the post was a story that the UK police are experimenting with fitting 8 mini-cameras to police officers helmets, to provide 360 degree video recording of incidents. The post links this innovation to the growth in CCTV and systems such as the ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition), to point out that we are increasingly being watched by people we can’t see. Part of the electronic wave I have written about before. For example, at the moment the UK Information Commissioner has estimated that there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK, one for every fourteen people, and the average person is captured on CCTV 300 times a day.

So, the panopticon society? The Panopticon was an idea for a prison designed by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1749-1832). The following definition is from Wikipedia
“The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a ‘sentiment of an invisible omniscience’.

The architectural figure ‘incorporates a tower central to an annular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells [...] are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also mazelike connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer’.”.

Bentham’s prison was never built in his lifetime, but there are prisons around the world modelled on Bentham’s ideas.

I do not know whether kdawson coined the term Panopticon Soceity (a Google search of “Panopticon Society” records 1,640 occurrences), or heard it elsewhere, but it seems to me a very apt phrase. We are all on view, and we can never be sure whether, at any given moment, we are being watched.