Power and Facebook Michel Foucault Essay

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Power and Facebook (Michel Foucault)

Throughout the course of his literary career, French philosopher Michael Foucault provided and considered several definitions for the term power, most of which were posited in view of the broader social implications of the word. Of particular note to this assignment is his conception of disciplinary power, which was engendered as a scion of traditional sovereign power, that in which its "form is the law of transgression and punishment…confronted by a power that is law…is he who obeys (History of Sexuality Volume 1, part 4, chapter 1, p.85)." Whereas sovereign power is generally employed as a negative effect of power in which individuals are restrained by litigation to keep from traversing society's laws and norms, disciplinary power is a more beneficial application of power which attempts to make people useful through a subtler means of curtailing their rights (Discipline and Punish, part 1, chapter 1, p. 11). This paper seeks to examine the nature of disciplinary power, and its particular techniques, to determine if internet applications of social media websites such as Facebook can be considered a manifestation of disciplinary power.

Even a cursory view of Foucault's written works will demonstrate the author's inherent concern for the exercise of power in modern social institutions such as prisons, which are readily supplied with occupants by the police (Discipline and Punish, part 3, chapter 3, p. 213). The philosopher believes that the focus of such social institutions (and prisons in particular) is to reform people rather than to merely inflict punishment upon them, which partially explains their resemblance to other correctional facilities and socio-economic institutions such as schools, factories and hospitals (Discipline and Punish, part 3, chapter 3, p. 205). The means by which they do so, however, are decidedly at variance with the typical corrective measures employed by traditional sovereign power structures in centuries prior to the 20th.

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Instead of publicly executing someone as a means of protecting society, modern social institutions have linked knowledge to power (History of Sexuality Volume 1, part 4, chapter 3, p. 107) to achieve a subtler method of reforming and even conforming society to its social conventions and mores. Disciplinary power, then, is based upon techniques of partitioning and visibility to allow social institutions to produce helpful individuals through the security and regulation of human differences.

Central to the conception of disciplinary power is the technique of visibility, in which an individual's actions and accountability for them may be publicly viewed and considered. This ideal form of voyeurism is intrinsically linked and founded upon Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which is a prison designed to allow inmates to constantly be visually monitored without their being aware of the spectator's gaze (Discipline and Punish, part 3, chapter 3, p. 200).The effects of such architecture in a social institution would certainly offer a preventative aspect of crimes (Discipline and Punish, part 3, chapter 3,….....

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