Class notes

Lecture on Digital Culture

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Course
SOCI203 (SOCI203)

Institution
Concordia University ( )

The text discusses digital surveillance and privacy, highlighting the challenges posed by the permanence of online behavior. It explores two issues: whether individuals should be held accountable for past actions, especially as teens, and the reality that digital footprints are permanent and can be...

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Uploaded on January 5, 2025
Number of pages 5
Written in 2024/2025
Type Class notes
Professor(s) Daniel dagenais
Contains Lecture on digital culture

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Digital Culture:

Alexi McCammond, a young American journalist who has been a reporter and a contributor to
famous channels such as NBC and PBS in the states. She reached a very career milestone and
got offered an new position. However, she lost the job opportunity because of racist and
homophobic tweets she published in her past. *Info stays online forever.*

There are two layers of this issue here:
The 1st being: whether someone should be held responsible for public comments made in the
past especially when they were still teenagers or very young.
And 2nd being: the reality wether we like it or not, wether it should be this way or not.
-What we do and say outline can be preserved on the internet and can stay there forever
because even tho we can delete our post, someone could have taken a screenshot and reposted
it.

Were constantly recorder, and it becomes our new normal, like our status of physical being or at
least this is our understanding of the reality today.

We so strongly believe that we are watched on a constant base by surveillance camera in the
subway station, by smartphones devices, by our cellphones.

Its more like a conspiracy theory

When we think the most efficient way to understand a person’s interests is to listen to that
person, we are thinking as human beings and not as computers.

For computers, they understand you base don your digital footprints and geolocation.
Therefore, when we ask if our phones are listening to us , the yes or no answrr is less important
than it doesn’t really need to.

Can be a scary thing for many of us to live constantly under supervision.

Idea of Panopticon: The English word derives from the Greek word “pane apte”. It is unique
form of star shaped architecture that allows for constant observation from the center of the
star.

Bentham proposed panopticon as a way to exerce social control within prisons. The idea is that
every behaviour of the inmates would be visible to the guards and the guards’ behaviour was
visible to the general public, we can maximize social control.

Foucault took the concept of panopticon from Betham but his idea was different because he
used it more as an analytical tool to understand how the modest society uses surveillance and

, discipline to control behavior, shaping individuals to self-regulate through internalized norms
rather than relying solely on physical enforcement.

There are several features of panopticon as a matter for power and social discipline in modest
society:
1. Such power and social control can exist in architectural and the geometry of the physical
space. This means that it is clear that panopticon prison, the star shape determines the
way of central control and similarly the layout of our classroom determines it is the
room for lectures and there can be minimum interaction between the professor and the
students in this room. This room does not encourage discussion and dialect. This is how
architecture, and the geometry of physical space can shape our relationships. Example:
the city or Paris throw an immense renovation between 1853-1870. This renovation
project was runned by a man named Haussman. This renovation has many purposes to
serve, for example to deal with the problem of overcrowded labour. TO do that, his plan
was to reconstruct and broaden the narrow roads in the streets. Before, during the
French revolution, barricades were built up in narrow streets to start the army to enter
neighbourhoods but after that the roads were wide enough that they could not use
barricades to cover the whole street.
2. Visibility is the form of power practice. This whole idea of panopticon relies on making
individuals constantly visible and observable so that their behaviours can be corrected.
The society has analyzed prisons, schools, in which there is an authority that is in control
and all the others are subjected to that control, to that power. Being constantly visible
and being aware of that can change people’s behaviour. But in a panopticon society, not
only the subjects are visible to the power center. The power center is also visible to the
public. It is a system of total discipline. A good example: Police officers being equipped
with body cameras (not always visible and recordable).
3. Sorting of individuals under control. Users are sorted based on their geolocations, types
of accounts, their interests, their watching history… all this “social society”(?) generates
data about a subject like you and me. This kind of data is used to customize certain
information shown to us. Used to shape our behaviour. It is a social reality for everyone
at this point.
4. About the nature of Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power. When we think of power,
essentially power practice by those in control we tend to regard it as something
repressive. Something to be resisted. Foucault’s development of disciplinary power
challenges this conventional idea of power as repressive and resistible. Instead, has
trying to show the other possible face of power as productive with some risk of
oversimplification, power center is used to repress certain behaviours that our
disapproved by the power center. Power is also practiced to produce new behaviours
that our preferred by the power center. For example: if our teacher asks us to do
nothing, she is practicing repressive power. However if she asks everyone to take notes,
she is not repressing our behaviours and instead she is producing a new behaviour.
When she produces the new behaviour, it also has the power to repress other
behaviours such as using our digital devices or checking your social media accounts.

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