Though the goal of reading everything in my "READTHIS" category on del.icio.us is more or less futile given the rate at which I tag pages with that particular string of letters, the tagging date and the reading date are getting closer. I've just finished an excellent essay on CTheory.net by Mark Winokur called "The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace." It's a well prepared and thorough piece, but also a lengthy and though-provoking one, so I'm going to limit my reactions to the section on the gaze as it relates to the panopticon as a conceptual structure for the internet.

First of all, it's key to note that the essay was written over three years ago, before many of the subjects of this blog (social media, etc) became major topics of discussion. I think that the popularization of all things we like to slap with the label "social" these days on the web has given us a wealth of examples of how the gaze and surveillance over the internet can be viewed. Winokur likes to contrast the internet-optimists (hypertext theorists most noticeably) with the more fatalistic critics, always taking the side of the fatalists who aim to reveal the power structures of larger institutions and ideologies. When discussing the gaze he pits those who see/once-saw the internet as the ideal anti-institutional method of communication against the idea that the physical architecture shatters any notion that the internet could be something other than a tool of late-capitalism. He specifically cites the client-server model as the reason why we are not in such a great new era: we still essentially have centralized control with overbearing power compared to those residing at the ends.

My issue with this is not in his conclusion: I would whole-heartedly agree that these unnamed idealists are wrong to think that the internet has that particular revolutionary potential. I've always fallen on the side of the debate that especially developments in the social web are ideal tools of control, augmenting and replacing outmoded apparatuses. Where I disagree with him is that I wouldn't say that these social media are effective tools of control because they follow a centralized system, but precisely because we've found ways to perfect their controlling capabilities through less centralized ways. We need only to look at distributed peer-to-peer networks to see that not all of "the internet" is a glorified hub-spoke network.

Though it at first seems contradictory, I would argue that panopticism has become distributed, especially within social networks. While the fictive gaze of the central guard in the panopticon is what holds prisoners in their self-regulating states, it is now the fictive gaze of the masses. Look at MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and blogs. We place and leave constructed bits of ourselves out there to be viewed by the multitude while at the same time we participate in the social game of the regulating gaze: each process informing the other. Our engagement in the act of the gaze also places us in the position of the spectacle. Imagine, perhaps, a panopticon that instead of having a central tower, were to give each of the prisoners binoculars so they could watch each other. Suddenly distributed panopticism is starting to look like distributed spectacularity.

Blogs are perhaps the best example here. A common stereotype of the blogger is the lonely teen who "rants" on his/her LiveJournal which no one probably reads. The imagined audience that the act of blogging implies is conceptualized along similar lines as the ficitive guard in the panopticon: a regulating, normative force. But at the same time, this lonely teen probably reads one or two other blogs by kindred spirits and thus is taking on the role of the guard him/herself. This can be extended to most actions within social media. Through every step of interaction, we are placed simultaneously in the position of the one watching and the one being watched.

To bring it back around to Winokur's piece, my main point is that I agree with him: the internet is a particularly effective tool of control. Where I differ is in how it achieves this end. Rather than imitating older models, it reshapes them creating a more idealized self-regulating subject.