Data Culture- Big Data and the Super Panopticon Reaction

Our in-class discussion today enlightened us to the possibilities of the super panopticon in databases. The panopticon is an idea that plays on the ignorance of the common man. At the core of Foucault’s idea of a disciplinary society seemed to be hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and analysis upon after examination. A distinctive feature and primary function of disciplinary society as a result of these characteristics were to correct deviant behavior. Foucault’s connection to John Bentham’s Panopticon and the disciplined society also connects to today’s regulated online behavior.

The Panopticon was a cylinder jail with a tower in the middle from which a guard could see and not be seen by all the prisoners in the jail cells that surround the tower. It was the ideal diagram of disciplined power because it minimized the amount of guards needed to watch and maximized the number of prisoners that could be watched. It was highly efficient because it gave the power of mind over mind because the prisoner believed they were always being watched thus causing them to self-check and regulate themselves to the laws of the prison. This created a moral compass of sorts by which each prisoner abided, depending on his belief of how closely he was being watched, but in general it created reform and a general conformity to one moral compass. This parallels today’s society with regards to how people use the internet, a series of databases. Some people are hyper sensitive about their data and use Virtual private networks to hide their data while others freely use Google, not caring about who is watching. Data is the guard that shapes our daily behavior- regardless of whether someone is watching a person’s interactions with online databases, we modify our online behavior as if someone is actually using our data.

Data Culture Group 6 (Response

Data itself is incredibly important to us as a society with virtually everything from medical records to banking records being computerized and even automated. As group 5 discusses in their post: “More data allows for more sophisticated data-processing, which in turn creates an increasingly automated society.” We found this point interesting as well as the point about there being a time when there is too much data for us to be able to store.  We believe that this is possible because data itself is not something that has to be built. Inevitably, there will come a time when the amount of data itself will overrun the space that we have available to store such data.  Reflecting on Group 1’s statement that as new data arises, new problems also arise, such as how to navigate and store the data, we would predict that the “constant string of innovation from data” will actually produce more data, continuing its exponential growth and heightening the challenges of storage.

 

We discussed in class the panopticon and the super-panopticon as well as government surveillance.  There seems to be a sort of metaphor in what we were talking about.  We in essence are inside this panopticon when it comes to government surveillance because we never really know if the government is tracking us and if they are storing our data. This poses new challenges but also provides us with more avenues in which we and the government can use this data.  Such avenues as Artificial Intelligence could help make finding data faster and more efficient, but could they evolve into something that we do not yet understand or cannot control?

 

Another interesting point that was mentioned in class was the video in which there was an interview talking about how fast computers have evolved.  We have gone from computers the size of rooms to our phone which is virtually a computer that we can fit in our pocket.  Will there come a time when the growth of computers that we have seen in the past 100 or so years will plateau, or can the technology surrounding computing keep up?