I led a discussion on Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Panopticism: The Birth of the Prison. Below are my notes for the conversation:

examines how discipline and punishment work in modern society

• plague: need order, boundaries of normal and abnormal are blurred; anyone can get sick (i.e. abnormal), and if sick/abnormal w/ plague, there is a danger to society
• start to see techniques and institutions for measuring and supervising abnormal beings
• quarantine sick people (lepers, plague people)
• create order; a pure, disciplined community

panopticon: prison architectural idea with tower at the center where you can see each prisoner

• sense of permanent visibility
• gives power over people's minds through architecture
• penality is no longer the dismemberment of the convict's body, but rather "indefinite examination"
• disciplinary society: move toward society functioning by by disciplinary mechanisms
• the state control of discipline
• the subordination of bodies that increases the utility of power while dispensing with the need for a prince

liberty and rights vs. control and observation

• for a society built on libery, prison as a deprivation of liberty is the obvious punishment
• Schools, factories, hospitals and prisons resemble each other
• examine and classify people, and make them conform to the "norm"

panopticon in tech

• online activity is surveilled
• pirate stuff on nyu network?
• data collection by social media companies
• NSA/Snowden: govt tracking our communications
• ISP advertising: not that you'll get sneaker advertisements, but more sinister companies will use your browsing history against you
• other examples?

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This week's assignment is use MongoDB. Mine is at http://174.138.50.66:3000/.