ABSTRACT
The image of the panopticon has been one the most powerful metaphors in locating the theoretical and social significance of CCTV in contemporary society. For Davis (1990), the design and operation of the urban shopping mall, with its centralized security control room, CCTV cameras, and private security guards, “plagiarizes brazenly from Jeremy Bentham’s renowned nineteenth-century design for the ‘panopticon prison’” (1990: 245). Fyfe and Bannister have argued that the spread of CCTV across British streets represents a dispersal of an “electronic panopticon” (1996). Similarly, Reeve has noted that in the commercial centers of towns and cities the use of CCTV is “clearly reminiscent of what Foucault has described as the disciplinary society, in his use of the metaphor of the panopticon as a device of total surveillance in a rationally ordered society” (Reeve 1998: 71).
