whether it’s funny or not. Does it show fear or confusion or uncertainty or weakness? Is it strange? Can it be used to degrade or humiliate someone? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Cast your vote.
Ridicule as power and control
To laugh at someone, to mock or ridicule a person is an exercise in power and control. To avoid being ridiculed further, the person will attempt to modify his behavior, hence the control. But this goes beyond control. The “minute technical inventions” that Foucault wrote about are now diffused throughout society as entertainment. We no longer have to go to the coliseum or the village green to see the show. Suffering as entertainment is playing on our computers, even our telephones.
We have gone well beyond being the passive consumers of suffering as entertainment and we no longer have Orwell’s Big Brother or even Hollywood to blame. Many of us are producing this “entertainment” ourselves. We are using it to hurt other people. The rest of us are standing by watching while this is being done.
In communities from a coffee shop in Melbourne to schools in New South Wales, Chicago, and Japan – observation as entertainment has been used to control and completely destroy people’s lives – even to the point of driving some of them to commit suicide. In most of the cases, there was no criminality involved because what happened was entertainment – not murder, manslaughter or assault. Entertainment. People were having fun. Nobody meant to hurt anyone. Everybody knows that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” What they don’t know is that a text message, a blog, or a YouTube clip kills whether you’re the Minister of Finance in Japan or a high school student in Western Massachusetts.
Conclusion
Bentham may have conceived the Panopticon as a “dream building.” For Orwell, the panopticon was the telescreen and with it, “private life came to an end.” (211) Foucault correctly saw it as a mechanism of power that had become diffused throughout society, “a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law.” (“Panopticism” 223)
Now we carry pieces of this incredibly powerful machine that was once a building around with us in our knapsacks and bags. In five minutes’ time, we can assemble the pieces and go on air to show the rest of the world what we have seen or heard. But like a kid who has just been given a new magnifying glass for Christmas, all we want to do with it is to burn the wings off flies.
Selected Bibliography
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---. “Panopticon Versus New South Wales.” Jeremy Bentham’s Works, Vol. 4. Ed. John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1893, 173-248 [First Letter To Lord Pelham, pp. 173-211; Second Letter To Lord Pelham, pp. 212-248].
“Cell phone obsession leads children into a ‘scary world.’” Daily Yomiuri 12 Jan. 2008: 4.
“Colombian town’s anti-gossip law has tongues wagging.” Daily Yomiuri 16 Oct. 2007: 21.
“Distraught father loses daughters, then reputation in media circus.” Asahi Shimbun 13 Dec. 2007: 21.
Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labour in Society. London: Macmillan Ed., 1984.
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Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975. London: Verso, 2003.
---. “Panopticism.” Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. 195-228.
---. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984. Trans. Alan Sheridan et al. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988.
---. “Power and Norm: Notes.” Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy. Sydney: Feral, 1979. 59-66.
“Girl commits suicide, blaming insults on blog.” Daily Yomiuri 2 June 2008: 2.
“Girl’s suicide thought linked to online bullying by classmates.” Daily Yomiuri 20 Jan. 2009: 2.
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Murai Masami and Watanabe Mitsuhiko. “School bullies increasingly tormenting victims online.” Daily Yomiuri 20 Nov. 2007: 4.
“Net anonymity spurs abuses.” Daily Yomiuri 4 Nov. 2005: 4.
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“New form of bullying by e-mail on rise.” Daily Yomiuri 19 July 2008: 2.
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Sheldrake, Rubert. The Sense of Being Stared At. New York: Crown, 2003.
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“Survey respondents say human rights abuses, slander rising.” Daily Yomiuri 27 Aug. 2007:2.
“Teen arrested in attack over dispute on website.” Asahi Shimbun 24 Apr. 2008: 23.
“Teen Web slander spinning out of control.” Asahi Shimbun 9-10 Feb. 2008: 21.
“20% of 38,000 student Web sites abusive.” Daily Yomiuri 15 Mar. 2008: 1.
“U.S. students post videos of schoolyard fights ….” Japan Times 8 Mar. 2009: 5.
“Web-related rights violations increasing.” Daily Yomiuri 4 Nov. 2005: 4.
Thank you to Dr. Susan Hosking and Professor Brian Castro of the University of Adelaide.
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