Panopticon

Quick meaning: Panopticon is a noun meaning (figurative, by extension) A place in which people are subject to constant surveillance at totalitarian command.

Meaning

(figurative, by extension) A place in which people are subject to constant surveillance at totalitarian command.

More Meanings

1. A room for the exhibition of novelties.
2. A type of prison where all the cells are visible from the center, particularly if it is not possible for those in a cell to know if they are being watched.
3. (historical) A kind of projector in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Example Sentences

Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.

He was alive to every creak and dunt, the thinness of the walls, as if the tenement block was a kind of aural panopticon that funnelled every sound to the other residents, let everyone eavesdrop on their business.

Panoptica are “all-seeing” systems such as penitentiary houses. They were famously theorized by Foucault as architectures of control, exemplary for forms of surveillance that discipline people and create particular kinds of subjects.

All this sounds like an unholy mess if one wants to produce a consistent, long-term database of biodiversity relevant information the world over. At the very least, it suggests that global panoptica are not the way to go in biodiversity data!

Word Forms

• panopticons
• panoptica

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include panorama, periscopism, polygonoscope, phantogram, videodrome, gonioprism.

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