Although Foucault wrote of his theory or Panopticism in 1977, based around Jeremy Benthams' design of the Panopticon in 1791, it can still be applied to present day life. Our culture has become one of surveillance, one that is shaped and moulded by our Government, we are becoming, as Foucault has said 'the utopia of a perfectly governed city.'
Examples of this are everywhere, the example I am going to focus on controls our roads. Recently there has been a huge increase in Speed Cameras and Average Speed Check cameras. Every bright yellow box that you approach on the road makes you check your speed and alter it to that of the road you are on. They bring you in to a 'state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.' Knowing that we are being monitored and will be fined for going over the speed limit makes us behave as the government wants us to.
The yellow boxes that we see could be detached from any network of cameras for all we know, just like in Benthams' Panopticon, the guards don't need to be present because the inmates asume they are watching and so they behave, 'visibility is a trap'. The threat of the camera means that the 'power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary', the speed cameras don't even have to be recording.
This is one way that our present day cultural society is controlled and turned into a 'disciplined society'
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