Panoptic Effect

The Panoptic Effect was theorized by Foucault and he wrote about this – Foucault (1977) Discipline, Punish, Harmonsworth: Penguin.

In this, it explains that there is a tower with wide windows, one on the inside and one on the outside, and this allows light to fill up one cell to another. It can hold any type of person with a supervisor in charge, so in this, it portrays a sense of power over the prisoners that they are being watched by a guard who they do not know whether that guard is there or not, and by the prisoners thinking they are being watched, you tend to change your behaviour as a result of being watched and this is called the Panoptic Effect, Pan being ‘everything’ and optic being ‘all seeing’, and this was explained by Foucault, and this can also be applied to the 21st Century linking to social media.

This can be applied to social media and how we portray ourselves through this, for example when posting a selfie, you as a person, always puts the best version of yourself onto different social media platforms, on these platforms, you are being ‘watched’ by thousands of people, so this causes us to change our behaviour to fit the social constructs of this.