Foucault discusses ideas such as discipline, surveillance, and power relations. The panoptic mechanism is the ultimate invasion of privacy. Foucault explains to us that we are constantly being watched which causes us to be afraid to do something different then the ideologies our society follows. “ The gaze is alert everywhere”( 94). This takes place on an everyday basis weather it be from the GPS systems, cell phones, internet. Taking a deeper look into these different technologies we come to realize that they are all panoptic mechanisms. “our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance”(101). We are the one that are scaring ourselves, yet we are also at fault by providing our personal lives out to the public. For instance Facebook, twitter, giving out our cell phone numbers etc… This has all become part of our culture and we are the ones who are at fault for this. Like eco says, “its visitors must agree to act like robots” we believe that to be accepted into society and to enjoy it we have to simply act like robots and imitate what everyone else is doing. This also goes back to Althusser and how he says that we live by ISA and RSA and how they are created by the people and we stand by them. We don’t know any better and this has all become a natural thing to us. “They tell us that if we want to be successful in life and get a good job, then we have to go to college.” These “rules”, have become so normal to us now that we do what we are told. As Foucault would say, “if we do not listen to authority, we will be punished.” Therefore we continue to follow everyone else.
Lyotard would say that this is exactly what he is talking about how we are living in a world of metanarratives and we live our day to day lives how everyone else tells us to and have the same beliefs and values like everyone else.
Although this reading was somewhat difficult for me I think I have a clear understanding of what Foucault is trying to argue. And I also think that Foucault is someone who can connect to a lot of previous theorists we have learned and I look forward to talking about him in class:0)
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2 comments:
Very good and clear blog. At first I wasn’t too sure where you were going with that blog, but the way that a patient cannot be contacted without the allocated physicians' approval mirrors to extent to which our government holds all of our information. What would be something great to think about would be the role politics play in government rule, particularly in America. If you think about it, is it very democratic for a central power with the ability to control its public? If we do not obey the government and what they rule then we are screwed! They can cut off social security, everything!
:)
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