As the holiday season is quickly approaching there always seems to be huge crowds at the mall with people shopping. The malls also seem to have a lot more police officers around making sure that shoplifting or other crimes do not happen at stores. Along with police officers and cameras installed at stores, there are now extra hidden cameras being put in mannequins at stores to ensure that shoplifting does not occur. People are also starting to buy a lot of things online. Whether it is to not deal with the large crowds, or just because one might not want to physically go to the mall. This can be a lot easier; however, with online hacking going on, it is hard to feel that online shopping is entirely safe during this time of the year. Hackers are able to track ones orders or look at ones credit card number. It feels like no matter what is going on you are being watched.
A form of power over individuals through supervising and surveillance is what Michel Foucault calls disciplinary power. Outside forces are molding individuals through monitoring them and their actions. Once it is continuously enacted it turns into self policing. Disciplines create docility within the body. There are three techniques to create a docile body, they are: scale of control, object of control, and modality. Scale of control means treating the body as individual parts. This controls minute parts of the body creating a particular movement. Object of control means to control the body through exercise (practice) by doing tasks that are repetitive to get the body to become a docile body. Modality means an uninterrupted constant coercion of supervising the practice of activity.
I remember especially when I was sixteen or seventeen years old and had my license. I was able to drive to the mall by myself and buy my parents and my brother presents for Christmas. I felt this surge of independence that I could do it by myself. The first store I entered I would be looking at things and one employee would ask me if I needed help, then another employee would ask the same thing. I quickly came to realize that because I was a teenager shopping by myself that they might have assumed I was going to shoplift. This happend at a couple of stores and after a while that feeling that I was going to shoplift became internalized. I then began to self police myself. Even when no one was around me, I would pick an item up look at it and put it down in a matter that showed I was not stealing it but putting it back down where it was. I then did this same practice of “proving” that I was not shoplifting at the rest of the stores I visited that day. I knew my intentions of going shopping were not to shoplift, but because I was being constantly monitored it made me want to prove to others that I was not a shoplifter. In this case, I had let the disciplinary power take control over my actions.
A form of power over individuals through supervising and surveillance is what Michel Foucault calls disciplinary power. Outside forces are molding individuals through monitoring them and their actions. Once it is continuously enacted it turns into self policing. Disciplines create docility within the body. There are three techniques to create a docile body, they are: scale of control, object of control, and modality. Scale of control means treating the body as individual parts. This controls minute parts of the body creating a particular movement. Object of control means to control the body through exercise (practice) by doing tasks that are repetitive to get the body to become a docile body. Modality means an uninterrupted constant coercion of supervising the practice of activity.
I remember especially when I was sixteen or seventeen years old and had my license. I was able to drive to the mall by myself and buy my parents and my brother presents for Christmas. I felt this surge of independence that I could do it by myself. The first store I entered I would be looking at things and one employee would ask me if I needed help, then another employee would ask the same thing. I quickly came to realize that because I was a teenager shopping by myself that they might have assumed I was going to shoplift. This happend at a couple of stores and after a while that feeling that I was going to shoplift became internalized. I then began to self police myself. Even when no one was around me, I would pick an item up look at it and put it down in a matter that showed I was not stealing it but putting it back down where it was. I then did this same practice of “proving” that I was not shoplifting at the rest of the stores I visited that day. I knew my intentions of going shopping were not to shoplift, but because I was being constantly monitored it made me want to prove to others that I was not a shoplifter. In this case, I had let the disciplinary power take control over my actions.