LAIZER EDWIN N BAPRM 42691

POWER, IDENTITY AND LIFE IN DIGITAL AGE;
 

We are not what we are but what we make of ourselves (Giddens, 1991: 75).Michael Foucault (1991) describes the operation of modern power using Jeremy Bentham’s design of the Panopticon, where people are disciplined into obedience by being tied to a particular space monitor the supervised and in turn, the supervised monitor themselves in what Foucault describes as technologies of the self a set of practices which modify and affect one’s behaviour and thinking (Martin, Gutman & Hutton, 1988). While these techniques have changed over time (e.g. the religious confessional, prisons, schools and the modern office) the operation of power has been materially grounded it was located in space and time and it depended upon mutual engagement between the supervisors and the supervised for the arrangement to work. As Bauman (2000) points out, the strategy is expensive and time-consuming with regards to the material infrastructure and manpower.

The digital age has produced new strategies which are cost effective largely because face-to-face engagement is no longer necessary. Electronic communication can take place at a distance, removing the need for expensive infrastructure and the co presence of supervisors with the supervised. Computer keystrokes can be automatically recorded making surveillance a simple and comprehensive affair. People are free to roam under the gaze of security cameras which store scenes of public and private spaces in centralized systems which can be retrieved at any time. 

Mobile phones permit the location of the user to be ascertained, and credit cards ensure purchases are recorded. There are digital footprints of our every move in modern times. The new set of practices for the operation of power function independently of space and time. Corporate managers operate private and former state-operated institutions from afar in areas which include finance, healthcare, education, transport, employment, communication and public utilities even water supplies come under corporate ownership. These corporate managers can respond by email in seconds and equally they can disappear no longer accessible answerable or responsible. 

These absent managers are members of corporate boards which have a common goal of maximizing profit, accompanied with a lack of responsibility should things collapse. Bauman (2000:11) the end of the era of mutual engagementen the supervisors and the supervised, capital and labour, leaders and their followers, armies at war. The prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance, the effective rejection of any territorial confinement with its cumbersome corollaries of order building, order maintenance and the responsibility for the consequences of it all as well as of the necessity to bear their costs (Bauman, 2000: 11).The disintegration of social and political networks and institutions tied to territorial borders have given way to transience, fluidity and rapid change in the pursuit of profit. It is the mind-boggling speed of circulation, of recycling, ageing, dumping and replacement which brings profit today not the durability and lasting reliability of the product (Bauman, 2000: 14). Corporate greed, disengagement and lack of responsibility are evident in the financial crisis which unfolded in October 2008, a global economic meltdown left to governments to resolve. The turmoil in the financial markets, described by former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan as a ‘once in a century credit tsunami’ took place at an astonishing speed across the world, reflecting the inter connectedness of the financial sectors in the global market and the lack of corporate responsibility Attached to that system.