Data collection and power

When I was in graduate school in the mid 1990s, I read Discipline and Punish by French political philosopher Michele Foucault. In his book, originally published in 1975, Foucault contrasts the penal system of France in the 1700s to the modern penal system and describes how each exercised power.

In the older model, punishment was bloody, public and torturous. The modern penal system appears more humanitarian, but power is exercised more subtly and completely by creating the sense that one is always being watched. Foucault argued that people would change their behavior if they knew someone could be watching, even if no one was actually watching.

When I was in graduate school, I remember thinking and writing that Foucualt's theory of power was crazy. He suggest sthat power has become a forcefield rather than something exercised by the individual  I kept thinking, how could power be exercised without people?

But I now see where Foucault was coming from and can't help but think how much foresight he had, given that he wrote Discipline and Punish 20 years before the advent of the World Wide Web.
Today corporations can  figure out when someone is pregnant before friends and family members know. The National Security Agency is collecting all sort of date on people.

Many Americans know about this data collection and have a ho-hum attitude toward it, thinking in regard to the government "I am not doing anything wrong so I don't care" or in the case of corporations, "It's convenient." It was very easy to set up this blog which will track my patterns of behavior.

But I would urge people to see this constant watching of us, in part, as an exercise of power. Because being watched does change our behavior. Buying a particular product only because we received a targeted coupon is only one such example. But other ways may be more subtle and even unknown to those whose behavior is changed.