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Intransigent Familiarity
As a predictive technique, then, the panoptic diagram calls on an all too familiar aggregated past to subtly limit access to different futures. The removal of uncertainty and by extension the need to make conscious decisions are replaced by an uncannily familiar world of images, goods, and services. Such is the case with digital television and a host of techniques on the Web, where programming and content are sometimes automatically filtered to reflect past viewing choices. As was shown in the TiVo example, such a networked view of the personal information economy takes us beyond the problematics associated with systems of personal identification or, for that matter, techniques of individuation (in a prison cell or a computer database).That consumer surveillance often ends up exposing our private lives (such as transactions and demographics) to the world is hardly surprising given the porous state of computer security and privacy laws. Its diagrammatic characteristics also call into question the increasingly intransigent (or disciplinary) technique of making aggregated past consumer behavior (consumer profiles) an instrumental blueprint for possible future consumer products and services or indeed for the very functioning of digital media. A TiVo receiver/recorder, for example, fails to function if it is disconnected (via a phone line) from the TiVo corporation’s main office.The diagrammatic view of panoptic surveillance consequently argues that subjects are not simply surveyed, monitored, or solicited for the purposes of automating a self-medicating acquiescence to social norms and rules (as some Foucaultian scholars might argue). In the panoptic diagram, consumers are not exclusively disciplined: they are both rewarded with a preset familiar world of images and commodities and punished by having to work at finding different and unfamiliar commodities if they attempt to opt out. The panoptic diagram, in other words, disciplines consumers only if they actively seek out the unfamiliar, the different, the previously unseen, purchased, or browsed. The need to dissuade such transgressive behavior through rewards and punishments is a technological requirement for diagrammatic ‘‘just-in-time’’ systems, where changes in any one aspect of consumer demand, sales, consumption, distribution, and production can drastically effect the whole system.
Thus, as we watch and monitor others and are ourselves monitored, our likes and dislikes are fed back to us, producing a familiar media and consumer environment. We are continuously solicited either with a ‘‘more of the same’’ product or with more inquiries meant to be cross-referenced to monitor new trends and changes in taste or simply to refine the effectiveness and precision of the diagrammatic process itself. As a consequence, we may soon find it compellingly easy and convenient to consume ‘‘more of the same’’ and increasingly more difficult to find something different.
