Comedy and Error
Comedy and Error
The concluding chapter focuses on two issues. Firstly it considers why a comic figure should come to embody so much of the debate about privacy. It examines the growth of the bureaucratic state that commenced in the late 1820s, concluding that the threat to the individual and domestic archive from government was less than most accounts assume. The change in surveillance systems was gradual, and the nature of liberal governmentality generated a reluctance to inquire in detail into personal lives in the face of the rowdy defence of the home by even the poorest in the community. Secondly, the chapter focuses on the frequency with which those prying on domestic secrets came to the wrong conclusions. It challenges the long-standing treatment of Bentham’s Panopticon as the model of modern surveillance and argues that there is a need to bring communication theory to bear on private discourse.
Keywords: surveillance, Bentham, panopticon, communication theory, intimacy, statistical movement, state bureaucracy
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