The New Panopticon

With my work bringing me back in touch with public high school education, and as someone recently acquainted with a third decade of mostly continuous consciousness, connecting with my students has been eye-opening.

The immortal hot topic among staff is cell phones. The students are, to put it lightly, addicted. They have had access to a screen since they were toddlers or younger. They do not know a world that lacks cell service or Wi-Fi. From their earliest memories, screens served as their sanctuary, confidant, looking glass, and most intimate connection to others. They are not the authors of the digital world they find themselves in, so I cannot blame them for their screen-plagued circumstances.

And yet, educators, mentors, and guardians saunter up to them and constantly demand that they put their phones away. We lament that if only they could pay attention, all of their problems would be solved. Grades improved, friendships strengthened, goals met, and accolades collected.

When I make this request, phones are nominally put away. The screen darkens and it turns over in hand. It is away just enough for some eye contact, a question, or directions. The moment I step away, eyes turn directly back to the light and onto the digital expanse that encompasses us all. My students disappear back into their voluntary panopticon of online data.

Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon is a circular prison where surveillance is ubiquitously implied. If someone believes they could be surveilled at any time, then they will police their own behavior to avoid punishment. People in a panopticon eventually internalize and self-regulate their own behavior to comply with what the surveilling authority desires. Michel Foucault expands the panoptic concept, noting that it can be applied to “treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, supervise workers, to put beggars and idles to work” (Discipline and Punish, 205). With the invention of CCTV and modern surveillance, any space can be modified into a panopticon. That a camera could be always watching from the periphery fulfills Bentham’s concept of universally implied surveillance. A comprehensive view of modern America could be constructed solely off of the camera feeds that now monitor a growing number of doorbells.

Our students are quite aware of the ubiquitous surveillance we live under. They congregate in sections of the hallways with the worst camera coverage. Every generation of high schooler has flouted the rules—and tried to do so clandestinely. What baffles me is that from the secrecy of the north hallway water fountain, they record and post online whatever stupid, against-the-rules thing they are doing. I’m thinking of dedicating a section of my next class to irony.

They are absorbed in Tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram, and other apps my decrepit thirty-year-old brain has never heard of. Dances are choreographed, hot-takes are crafted, and flexes are flaunted across every possible platform. Once their curated personas are released to the universe, they refresh their pages for any blip of response. They willingly participate in the digital panopticon, seeing and hoping to be seen.

My students self-regulate according to the authority of their digital space, rather than ones more physically immediate. I can demand their physical attention, but their minds belong to the panopticon of the web. They are warden, guard, and inmate in the digital world whose fuzzy borders leak increasingly into our own.

They do not, however, belong to the panopticon of Bentham and Foucault. The power structures that provide balance and pro-social behavior fail in the digital panopticon. There is no obvious central watch tower. The imagined situation room where a team of Tom Cruise look-alikes scour over a dizzying number of live feeds does not exist. There are a few major entities monitoring the web (ISPs, various government agencies, and private corporations) but they are not unified and their purposes are not uniform. We have instead a decentralized audience of anonymous eyes. The eyes are further separated by factions with tenuous alliances. Punishments are not systematic or predictable, instead left to the whimsy of the hive. Without a unified authority with consistent enforcement, the goal of the original panopticon, a sufficiently self-regulated populace cannot be created.

Unique to the digital panopticon is personal reward and success beyond that of avoiding punishment. If someone is seen enough in the right way, fame and fortune can flow to them for however long it can be wrangled. Completely unknown people become celebrities overnight, their lives forever changed. Our students not only know of these people but actively contribute to their rise and fall. When a sufficient following is amassed, a new minor authority is born within the panopticon. This new authority spawns a splinter group that begins to self-regulate independently of the rest of the prison. The splinter group now has a locus of surveillance that is isolated to a small part of the whole.

Being a part of a spontaneous new structure of authority is empowering. One can wrestle a feeling of autonomy back from the faceless void of the impersonal web by voluntarily limiting oneself to sections of one’s choosing. It does not matter what the new group is centered around, it only matters that it is unique from the perceived uniformity of the rest of the panopticon. These smaller groups, funnily enough, function more effectively as a traditional panopticon due to the emergence of a centralized power that can be obtained in a curated space. Outside of the group, the language, customs, and leaders are unknown. Within the group, there is nothing but the group. Cultish and extreme describe some of the online spaces that have grown large enough to be noticed by the rest of the digital world. Some are looked upon with confusion and discomfort, like furries, while others are seen as legitimately dangerous, like incels and QAnon. Of course, even the non-extreme self-imposed prisons of the digital world can still be damaging. This is not true for all online spaces, but the potential is always there when policing is left to those willing to seek even inconsequential power and influence. There is insufficient space here to get into the iceberg of online communities and their effects. If you’re interested, there is a mountain of information exploring that topic.

The digital panopticon differs from Bentham and Foucault’s panopticon in that of a missing central surveilling authority and the ability for inmates to become minor authorities of their own. At school, we offer the traditional panopticon: become your own guard and avoid punishment. Online, students are offered the new panopticon: a chance, however slight, to become warden, guard, and inmate of an authority of their choosing. If they are trapped anyway, why not in a box of one’s own making?

Despite the description, the school and my students are not an Orwellian dystopia of mindless zombies. They are young and still filled with passions that have captivated humans for centuries. Between posts and ignored class work, some hone their incredible drawing skills. The basketball teams command the attention of all but the most staunchly uninterested students. The student council meets and many of our students take their internships and post-secondary opportunities immensely seriously. They are funny, witty, and kind. They are also underserved, under-guided, and addicted to the scraps of recognition they get from the digital world.

Most importantly, they are not a lost generation. They are navigating a world that would have crushed my peers and I. In the ‘00s, we spent our days in the fancy new computer labs passing around thumb drives with Halo: Combat Evolved and Counter-Strike 1.6, dedicating far too many of our synapses to shortcuts for tabbing through programs to forever give the illusion of productivity to the poor educator who learned to write code in DOS. If we had access to the internet in its current state when we were in high school, we would have disappeared into the screen as fast as possible.

The fates would have it that I am now in the position of the poor educator who learned to code in DOS. My technical expertise is rooted in Windows ‘98 and I’ve been stretching that to its limits ever since. By far the biggest difference between my students and me is that they have far more choice in the decor of their prison walls than I did. I cannot say, however, that I envy them.