Increasingly centralized databases provide a material basis for a vastly extended Panopticon that could include the Internet. Even now, there is talk of network censorship, in part through (artificially) intelligent agents capable of surveillance. From Foucault’s perspective, the most important factor would not be how frequently the agents are used or censorship is enforced. Like the threat of a tax audit, what matters most is that people know the possibility is always present.
Predictor: Turkle, Sherry
Prediction, in context:In her 1995 book “Life on the Screen,” Sherry Turkle – an accomplished social psychologist, sociologist and anthropologist from MIT whose studies centered around people and computers for decades – writes: ”The social philosopher Jeremy Bentham, best know for his espousal of utilitarianism, proposed a device called the Panopticon, which enabled a prison guard to see all prisoners without being seen. At any given moment, any one prisoner was perhaps being observed, perhaps not. Prisoners would have to assume they were being observed and would therefore behave according to the norms that the guard would impose, if watching. Individuals learn to look at themselves through the eyes of the prison guard. Foucault has pointed out that this same kind of self-surveillance has extended from the technologies of imprisonment to those of education and psychotherapy. We learn to see ourselves from a teacher’s or a therapists’s point of view, even in their absence. In our day, increasingly centralized databases provide a material basis for a vastly extended Panopticon that could include the Internet. Even now, there is talk of network censorship, in part through (artificially) intelligent agents capable of surveillance. From Foucault’s perspective, the most important factor would not be how frequently the agents are used or censorship is enforced. Like the threat of a tax audit, what matters most is that people know the possibility is always present.”
Biography:Sherry Turkle was the author of “Life on the Screen: Computers and the Human Spirit.” and a professor of the psychology of science at MIT. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Privacy/Surveillance
Name of publication: Life on the Screen (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 9: Virtuality and its Discontents
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 247, 248
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney