4 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2021
    1. As Bentham realized and Foucault emphasized, the system workseven if there is no one in the guard house. The very fact of generalvisibility-being seeable more than being seen-will be enough toproduce effective social control.4 Indeed, awareness of being visiblemakes people the agents of their own subjection. Writes Foucault,He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, as-sumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes themplay spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the powerrelation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomesthe principle of his own subjection.

      The panopticon works as a system of social control even without someone in the guardhouse. It is being seeable, rather than being seen, which makes it effective.

      I don't understand what Foucault says here.

  2. Apr 2019
    1. Amazon.com Inc. is positioning Alexa, its artificial-intelligence assistant, to track consumers’ prescriptions and relay personal health information, in a bid to insert the technology into everyday health care.

      Surveillance capitalism, anyone?

  3. Nov 2017
    1. the terrible, horrible, no-good university administrators are trying to build a panopticon in which they can oppress the faculty
    1. Mount St. Mary’s use of predictive analytics to encourage at-risk students to drop out to elevate the retention rate reveals how analytics can be abused without student knowledge and consent

      Wow. Not that we need such an extreme case to shed light on the perverse incentives at stake in Learning Analytics, but this surely made readers react. On the other hand, there’s a lot more to be said about retention policies. People often act as though they were essential to learning. Retention is important to the institution but are we treating drop-outs as escapees? One learner in my class (whose major is criminology) was describing the similarities between schools and prisons. It can be hard to dissipate this notion when leaving an institution is perceived as a big failure of that institution. (Plus, Learning Analytics can really feel like the Panopticon.) Some comments about drop-outs make it sound like they got no learning done. Meanwhile, some entrepreneurs are encouraging students to leave institutions or to not enroll in the first place. Going back to that important question by @sarahfr: why do people go to university?