The end of forgetting: Strategic agency beyond the panopticon

Abstract

The rapid explosion of information technologies in recent years has contributed to a substantive change in the social dimensions of information-sharing, and is forcing us to revise substantially our old assumptions regarding the knowledge/power dynamic. In this article, we discuss a range of strategic information-management options available to individuals and institutions in the networked society, and contrast these ‘blueprints’ to Foucault’s well-known panopticon model. We organize these observations and analyses within a new conceptual framework based on the geometry of ‘information flux’, or the premise that the net flow of information between an individual and a network is as relevant to power dynamics as the nature or volume of that information. Based on this geometrical model, we aim to develop a lexicon for the design, description and critique of socio-technical systems.