the participatory panopticon
How could we not rejoice over an article from a ‘long term thinker’ referring to the ever inspirational panopticon, to which, in a sense, also pantopicon’s name refers?
Fellow futurist and blogger Jamais Cascio has written a column on Futurismic about what he calls the participatory panopticon and describes as follows:
“The participatory panopticon is the emerging scenario of distributed observation of the world around us, using cheap, networked tools like mobile phones and open, web-based tools like YouTube. A rapidly-growing number of us have literally at our fingertips systems of capturing and sharing what we see.”
Cascio describes the shape the participatory panopticon as a phenomenon is taking in terms of “mass participation, fakes and self-recording-for-self-defense” and goes on to address the ambiguous light this evolution shines on notions of safety, privacy and public/citizen participation. He warns for careful consideration in order not to fall into the trap of unilateralism of (mis)use, where scandal is the only output. In other words:
“The participatory panopticon is the emergence of an uncoordinated, haphazard form of reciprocal accountability, relying more on scandal than on process. We will need to pay more attention to how these practices are formalized for one very important reason: The participatory panopticon watches us all.”
The race is on and citizen groups, companies, public organizations and countries are pushing for measures (e.g. this week the Belgian senate set a legal framework to the use of surveillance cameras).
In a way a ‘hypercamerized world’ also implies a pantopicon-like situation in the sense that many different ‘camera’-angles, allow to address situations from a variety of perspectives.
Via Openthefuture.com, see also ITConversations’ (older) podcast
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