ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer a critical diagnosis of die community care that telecare technologies are bringing about by establishing a dialogue among the following three areas: an ethnography conducted between 2003 and 2004 in a telecare service located in Catalonia/Spain, the Foucauldian literature on governmentality and the so-called Surveillance Studies. Telecare is often presented as a service that can cut long-term care costs by transforming the traditional organization of care delivering. Drawing on surveillance and governmental studies, the three before mentioned polarities concerning telecare might actually be expressing a structural shift from a society made of panoptic institutions to one made of post-panoptic control arrangements. Regarding the process of constituting subjectivity, telecare might also fit within a post-panoptical regime because the constant adjustment of habits and spatialities in permanent transformation is much more important than the production of a specific, coherent and stable identity for the users.
