Panopticon

The word “panopticon” is a combination of two Greek words:

πᾶν (pân, “all”) and ὀπτικός (optikós, “visible, vision”)

The vision of all – the total vision.

The concept was coined by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, one of the epigones of the Enlightenment and the founder of the Utilitarianism.

The panopticon is an architectural design of the ideal ideal prison – but it was also thought as a model for factories.

The panopticon was thought a much more efficient way to keep the people in prison:

The total vision. 

There was no space to hide,

The controller could see any time anyone.

And most importantly, inmates could also watch and control each other.

The total vision is, at the same time, the total control.

Behavioral Surplus

Shoshana Zuboff is the author who has studied in most depth the role of behavioral surplus in the digital technologies.

Most of the data in this learning unit are taken from her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” – a necessary reference to understand the societal and economic development  brought about by the new digital communication technologies.

Surveillance Capitalism in Amazon

Research in the Era of Surveillance

Particularly in the area of research the brutal penetration of online platforms forces us to reconsider everything we have been doing.

The new realities of behavioral surplus and data extraction makes obsolete many of the things we have been teaching in our strategic communication courses – and you may have learned in this course so far.

The Internet of Things

Will internet disappear in the next future, as Erick Schmidt, Google’s CEO prophesied in the World Economic Forum of 2015?

The prophecy is that Internet will dissolve because it will be replaced by a new fashion of digital interconnectivity: The Internet of Things.

Shoshana Zuboff describes this new era as a digital dystopia. We will be surrounded by interconnected sensors that will be constantly providing information about us, our environment, our behavior, our social interactions. 

A brave new world governed by “ubiquitous computing”.

In the next video, you can learn what this term means and how it might affect all areas of our life.