ABSTRACT
When Jeremy Bentham designed the ‘panopticon’ in the eighteenth century, surveillance cameras were not available. Even when Michel Foucault analysed the panopticon’s social meanings, video surveillance was not an issue. Yet the principle of video surveillance is much the same as the principle of this ‘ideal prison’: to be seen but to never know when or by whom. In industrialized societies around the world the number of surveillance cameras and the amount of space under surveillance have grown massively in recent decades. Surveillance cameras have electronically extended panoptic technologies of power, transforming cities into enormous panopticons (for discussion see, for example, Cohen 1985; Davis 1990; Lyon 1994; Oc and Tiesdell 1997; Ainley 1998; Fyfe and Bannister 1998).
