Panopticon

The word “panopticon” is a combination of two Greek words:

πᾶν (pân, “all”) and ὀπτικός (optikós, “visible, vision”)

The vision of all – the total vision.

The concept was coined by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, one of the epigones of the Enlightenment and the founder of the Utilitarianism.

The panopticon is an architectural design of the ideal ideal prison – but it was also thought as a model for factories.

The panopticon was thought a much more efficient way to keep the people in prison:

The total vision. 

There was no space to hide.

The controller could see any time anyone.

And most importantly, inmates could also watch and control each other.

The total vision is, at the same time, the total control.

Origins of Internet

The origins of Internet had nothing to do with total control. Internet was – and it still is – just a network of computers linked to each other. In those days, Internet had not commercial use. It was a tool that allowed university-scholars to communicate to each other. 

Internet had also some use for military projects.

It was difficult to use, navigation was very slow, and only highly trained individuals could configure a modem. Moreover, not everybody had a PC in the early 1980’s.

The information that you could find online was interesting for just a couple of individuals – it was not attractive for the broad public – just for a limited group (frequently referred to as computer nerds). 

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee led a 99 days development effort that resulted in the introduction of the World-Wide-Web.

What Berners-Lee created was the so-called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The HTTP is based on the idea of the HYPERLINK

A HYPERLINK is just a string of characters accompanied by encoded information about the location of specific information.

Before the invention of the HTTP, the only way one individual could get information from other computers was the so-called TELNET PROTOCOL (a long, unreliable and annoying process that necessarily needs a connection with the computer server). 

In 1993, Marc Andreesen, graduate student at the university of Illinois, created a browser that introduced necessary advances for the popularity of internet:

• You could go to the hyperlink with a click on the mouse.
• The document that appeared on the screen could be formatted with headlines, bullet lists, and various other text treatments.
• The document could include graphics and photos.
• The software resided on the user’s computer – and not on a remote server.

They also developed HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that was very simple to learn.Three decades later, the Internet, that network of interconnected computers, has pervaded every single aspect of our life. It has gone far beyond the original goal of becoming a research sharing tool. Internet is now an omnipresent educational tool, the most common platform to do research from elementary school to higher education. It is the new marketplace where we do business, buy product or services, look for information and entertainment, foster our social life, look for romantic relationships, adult encounters or health services. And of course, Internet based applications and services have become an indispensable tool for political organizations and actors to influence public opinion.

Behavioral Surplus

Shoshana Zuboff is the author who has studied in most depth the role of behavioral surplus in the digital technologies.

Most of the data in this learning unit are taken from her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” – a necessary reference to understand the societal and economic development  brought about by the new digital communication technologies.

Surveillance Capitalism in Amazon

The Internet of Things

Will internet disappear in the next future, as Erick Schmidt, Google’s CEO prophesied in the World Economic Forum of 2015?

The prophecy is that Internet will dissolve because it will be replaced by a new fashion of digital interconnectivity: The Internet of Things.

Shoshana Zuboff describes this new era as a digital dystopia. We will be surrounded by interconnected sensors that will be constantly providing information about us, our environment, our behavior, our social interactions. 

A brave new world governed by “ubiquitous computing”.

In the next video, you can learn what this term means and how it might affect all areas of our life.