The Digital Panopticon: Surveillance, Power, and COVID-19 - 18-34

Abstract

This project considers the contributions of the panoptic conception by Jeremy Bentham, Michel Foucault and Byung-Chul Han, in order to analyse the dynamics and forms of control exercised throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, how these acted and what role individuals and new technologies played. While Bentham's original vision of the panopticon was rooted in its architectural application to prisons, our inquiry transcends the physical and transitions into the insights of Michel Foucault and Byung-Chul Han, focusing on their notion of power, biopolitics and psychopolitics. Moreover, in the digital era we find a tendency to conceive the space of communication as a space of freedom, but in this surveillance society, which exploits this freedom to the maximum, these spaces become spaces of control. The panopticon proposals give us a key conceptual framework to consider the actions, scenarios and responses to the COVID-19 health crisis. Thus, the conjunction of positions on the panopticon, power and surveillance, take on relevance when we talk about the past pandemic and its effects.