The Information Panopticon

It was very early on that Man realised that any organized work or activity requires some sort of supervision. It is for the sake of supervision that there are hierarchies in every organization. Supervision was even built into the architecture of buildings like schools, banks, prisons and hospitals; the supervising authority had an overview or a “panopticon” of the subjects, by which they could examine the activity and status of each and every one of the subjects. This is carried on to the present in the form of the Information Panopticon, where we are constantly being supervised with the help of technology.

Michel Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison gave examples of this kind of architecture. A prison, for example, had a central tower in which a guard was housed. The tower was surrounded by the cells. Hence, the guards could easily supervise the inmates. Even in many schools, the classrooms are arranged in a circle for easy supervision. Inside the classrooms, the teacher stands on a raised platform and can monitor students. In hospitals, all the wards would be transparent so that the status of the patient could be checked on any time.

Today, supervision by architecture has been replaced by supervision by computers. As much of our work today involves some kind of computer operation like running a program, creating a document or sending an email, this supervision becomes easy. The time stamp on our work automatically tells the boss when the job was done. A striking observation of this is that the supervising entity cannot be negotiated with or pleaded with. As always, the replacement of man by machine brings in some kind of rigidity. The machine simply does what it is programmed to do; neither does it need to negotiate with the subordinates nor does it need to listen to their excuses. Thus, the information panopticon has this impact on our work lives. Let us take for example the computerisation of British banking industry in the 70’s and early 80’s.

In British banking the traditional mode of training prior to computerization was based on a master-apprentice model, according to Steve Smith (1989). Employment began at age 15 or 16, and one then rose level by level through a pyramidal hierarchy. Ultimately, with luck and aptitude, any employee could hope to become manager of a branch bank or even a general manager at corporate headquarters. Along with this career structure went an ethos of employee flexibility. Clerks had a relatively wide range of skills, allowing them to shift from task to task during the banking day. British bankers installed computers as part of a general plan to move away from the craft-apprenticeship model toward a rationalized industrial production model. Computers facilitated, for example, progressive specialization of tasks and automation of a great deal of work once done by hand. Along with this specialization went a deliberate restructuring of career paths.

Thus, we can see that the use information panopticon in our work lives can bring about radical changes not only to the structure of the work system but also to the skill set and the attitude of the individual workers. But we can safely say that this change is for the better since it leads to greater efficiency and productivity.

By Pranav R Kamat

References:

Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison”