To understand the information pan-opticon it is first important to understand the general ideas behind the concept of the pan-opticon and then apply it to the information domain. The idea of panopticon originally introduced by philosophers like Foucault was developed as a tool for constant surveillance, the ideology behind this was that in institutions like schools and prisons where it was required that the higher authority should be in constant vigilance. To achieve this the higher authority in both these cases should be on top of any situation literally and figuratively. So these places have to be designed and constructed in such a manner that there exists a location from which the higher authority can oversee the whole institution. These were the ideas of architecture proposed by architects like Bentham who designed many schools, prisons and hospitals. The same idea is carried over even in the factory and the manufacturing line process where the manager has the complete view of the shop floor so that he can maintain certain amount of discipline in his factory and penalize his workers as and when they do not follow the rules.
While talking about the information panopticon it is important to understand that this is essentially the idea of the panopticon applied to the information domain which is complete visibility of information and information surveillance. This leads to a creation of a system where information is so well organized, stored and kept under surveillance that absolutely nothing goes missing. The only difference in this case is that as the information system is vaster than a system of people it is way more difficult to regulate, so much so that the definition of the ‘higher authority’ becomes more ambiguous as the information becomes more and more accessible. This is exactly what has been happening from the 80’s and is continued even today. The easy accessibility of information which can be mainly attributed to the advances and developments in ICT has led to large scale delocalization of information. In today’s scenario any person can get information to the length that it gives a superiority feeling much the same obtained by jailers and principals. Developments in areas like social networking giving rise to sites like facebook and data mining which lead to the creation of google , have made information so easy flowing that entire lives of people can be accessed by the click of the mouse. Any layman can become the ‘higher Authority’ and can obtain control and survey information about people. The advances in ICT have made this flow very smooth and easy. The main question to be posed here is weather this decentralization is really required and where to draw the line as far as personal information goes, sites like google display the most personal of information about people and their lives to any random person who wants to know about them. This is clearly the violation of personal space because if compared with schools and prisons the inmates there deserved that the level of scrutiny that they were placed under because in the case of prisons they had done something unlawful which had gotten them there and in the case of schools the pupils themselves enrolled in the school, so they themselves made a choice to undergo that level of scrutiny, but in the case of the information panopticon this whole argument is torn apart because any random person can be subjected to intense scrutiny and that too for no apparent reason.
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