post class 11/12

After discussing Foucault in class, I think I have a greater understanding of what he was overall trying to say, and a lot of his theories and discussions in the text interest me. In today’s society pretty much everything we do is being watched or recorded in some way. For example everything email, blog post, Facebook picture and so on is documented and recorded online. This idea of “our society is one not of spectacle but of surveillance” is so prevalent. Even our phones have GPS’s in them so we can be tracked at any time. This at first reminded me of the book 1984. However when discussing this idea of surveillance in class, it reminded me of the television show LOST. In one of the seasons of the show, Jack, Kate, and Sawyer were captured by the others and forced to live in cages in the middle of a secret island. While they were in there “the others” were watching them in surveillance rooms. There were cameras set up in the cages, as well as all the rooms they occupied so that they could have a constant watch over them. There were other times in this show when this happened as well. The idea of Jacob and the “man in black” who founded the island, and couldn’t die, also were always watching and knew what was going on at all times during their existence. The picture below is of one of the cages from the scene I described,

All of this reminded me of what Faucult was discussing in his writing about the Plague. The panopticon was used to watch the inmates at all times, or at least made the people think that they were being watched. This is something I question about the panopticon and being watched. I think that this most likely interferes with our rights as citizens. We are given freedoms, but being watched constantly isn’t very free.