Living in a Panopticon
Hii peeps… hope you’re all doing well! Hmm… what am I ranting about today? Nothing dramatic, just a concept that caught my attention a long time ago and still randomly pops into my head. So I thought I’d share my thoughts, and maybe (if you’re willing) I’d love to hear your take too. The concept comes from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish : the idea of the Panopticon . Now, a bit of history first (this part might sound boring, but I promise the concept itself is too cool , so bear with me). The Panopticon actually begins with Jeremy Bentham , an 18th-century philosopher. He designed it as a prison where a single guard could observe all prisoners from a central tower, without the prisoners ever knowing when they were being watched. The trick? They’d behave as if they were always being watched. So how does this connect to Michel Foucault? In the 1970s, Foucault wasn’t really interested in the prison design itself, but in what it symbolized . In Discipline and Punish , he us...
