Comments on: The Portable Panopticon: Participatory Media and the Technologies of Surveillant Democracy

By: ua27

ua27 — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 11:00:39 +0000

James - have you written any further on this topic? I’m doing a dissertation on digital imagery at the moment and am covering alot of what you’ve mentioned here - the panopticon in particular and the nature of “Power” in a digital society.

If you’ve not managed to write further can you recommend any good scholarly writing on the topic? Thanks!

By: Tout Informatique

Tout Informatique — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:33:56 +0000

Materiel informatique: l’exposition des technologies informatiques en Allemagne lutte contre le réchauffement climatique….

Pendant la première semaine de mars la ville allemande Hannover était le centre mondial d’informatique. 5800 des firmes de 77 pays du monde ont présenté sur l’exposition CeBIT-2008 leurs nouveautés dans le domaine des technologies informatiques….

By: Sidekick 4

Sidekick 4 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:00:31 +0000

Sidekick 4…

Sidekick 4…

By: Terry's Thoughts

Terry's Thoughts — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:05:11 +0000

Terry…

For the most part I agree with you and enjoy reading your posts….

By: Chuck Tryon

Chuck Tryon — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 13:27:02 +0000

I’ve been planning to reply to your proposal for a while because I am fascinated with these uses of participatory media as a form of surveillance. The use of video in documenting George Allen’s use of a racial epithet is one other famous example, of course, and there have been a couple of high-profile cases of cameras capturing troubling celebrity behavior (Michael Richards’ racist tirade and, less famously, the possibly staged “Pictures of Assholes” involving actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Like you, I’m ambivalent about these technologies and their social uses. They seem to democratize access to recording and broadcast technologies while also creating a panoptic system. I chose the celebrity cases purposefully because of the inherent power issues involved in the cult of celebrity and the cultural shock that seemed to emerge when it was revealed that the guy who played Kramer (!) could have turned out to be such a bad guy.

It also seems significant that a number of these cases seem to turn out to be related to race or racism (Allen, Kramer, many of the police brutality videos), but I’m not sure where else to go with that. But these are interesting issues and I’ll be curious to see how you address them.

By: James Daniel Elam

James Daniel Elam — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:00:49 +0000

Thanks for your comment. I myself have mixed feelings about it, which is my primary reason for being interested at all. To situate my feelings along some sort of scale, I think I’d be somewhere in the middle of believing this technology has the power to a) put democracy and power in the hands of everybody (good!) and b) create a million-eyed panopticon big brother formation (bad!). Thus, I don’t know entirely where I situate my own argument - maybe it should never be situated. The more “writers” involved in the “writing” would produce a multiplicity of ideas, potentially never situated (or at least usurping the others’ situation)… this would then really be a very exciting project.

By: cyberdiva

cyberdiva — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:49:04 +0000

James - sounds like a very interesting idea. You are likely to get very mixed responses from readers and so the text that emerges out of this “writing” might be have multiple points of entry. I hope to have more detailed commons soon