Panopticon - it's as creepy as it sounds

The Architecture of Surveillance: The Panopticon Prison Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. via Wikimedia Commons

The panopticon is an architectural design for a prison, used by Foucault (1977), a French social historian, to explore how discipline was utilised by the state in mid-nineteenth-century France (Hope, 2013; Flyvberg, 2006). Foucault (1977) drew upon the design, originally published by Jeremy Bentham in 1791, as a powerful model for social analysis, suggesting that constant surveillance could encourage individuals to monitor and adjust their own behavior. Foucault discusses surveillance as only one aspect of panopticism, as part of a much wider discourse of “disciplinary technology”, regimes of control, labelling of individuals, and keeping of records.