Currently Happening Presently Now: POWER

"But in thinking of mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourse, learning processes and everyday life."
-Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other writings 1972-1977, Ed. Colin Gordon, Trans. Colin Gordon, et al., 1980, page 39.

"Fundamentally, the control of consciousness via the control of discourse is a vast generalized case of interiorized surveillance, what we earlier refered to as the discursive procedure of surveillance, or panopticism. Panopticism, here, is not merely a discursive procedure. It is a socio-political goal. Coercion, rather than operating by means of external pressures such as physical restraints, functions by means of the internalization of procedures of discourse within the consciousness of the 'controlled' subjects...With new communications technology, there is an internalization of such discursive procedures as means/end logic, a problem-solving conception of knowledge, and certain patterns of information and ordering. Once internalized, all of these procedures have a surveillance capacity over the subject's social interaction. Since such procedures characterize both discourses on and of new communications technology, it is not far-fetched to suggest that such an internalization is occuring in the 'information society'. In other words, the users of new communications technology have become the principal operators of their own subjection by assuming and interiorizing the discusive procedures on and of new communications technology.
Panopticism is a seminal concept for understanding the relationship of communications procedures to social control. It is far too costly and complicated for a State or an institution to maintain control over its citizens by means of external, physical pressure.
Panoptic discursive control has three advantages: (1) it allocates power at a very low cost; (2) it provides for maximum breadth of social control, especially as discourse is mass-diffused; (3) the output of discursive formations may be directly linked to the economic growth of power...new communications technology, by becoming ever more ubiquitous and more standardized, also congeals discourse into fixed, internalizable patterns of knowledge and, consequently, of social behavior."
-Marike Finlay, Powermatics: A discursive critique of new communications technology, 1987, page 177-78.

"Power treats human bodies as so many signs to be subjected to an incessant decoding process: its eye isolates, examines, judges, and corrects them, sometimes eradicates, even 'vaporizes' them when necessary...People who are identical to one another become alien to one another. They must also be expropriated from their own selves...The uprooted man is amnesiac, memory is forbidden him.
Power must thus become master of language since language is the living memory of man and offers him a space for inner resistance. Language constitutes a screen between the totalitarian gaze and the human body, it offers the shelter of its shadow, it veils the harsh light needed to read bodies. Language threatens the totalitarian enterprise. It is in fact the zone of obscurity where the gaze is lost. People must therefore be cured of their language: old and obscure terms must be eliminated, areas that escape definition, and zones of indetermination-ambiquity, equivocation, polysemy wiped out. Signs must be purged and purified of their meaning and bodies of their substance. And then they must be refilled...
The invention of Newspeak owes much to this ideal of absolute visibility (Panopticism),
and Orwell had rediscovered it in Ogden's minimal language...Ogden was one of the most authoritative interpreters of the linguistic developments in Bentham's thought. Basic English is merely its application. Besides, in 1929 Ogden had already conceived of a language even more abbreviated than Basic because it contained no more than 500 vocabulary words. Its name? Panoptic English..."
-Jean-Jacques Courtine, A Brave New Language: Orwell's Invention of Newspeak in 1984, Substance, vol. 15, n^o50, page 69-74.

Moats, L. (2012). Reconciling the common core state standards with reading research. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 38(3), 15-18.

_{"It is not clear why 'Speaking and Listening' standards are separate from 'Language,' for example, until one realizes that the 'Language' standards pertain almost exclusively to written, not oral, language. The language standards at each grade level presume oral language competence and mastery of foundational reading and writing skills. There is no category for 'Writing Foundations' to parallel 'Reading Foundations' and thus the foundational skills of writing, including handwriting, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, usage, and sentence composition, are either overlooked, underestimated in importance, or awkwardly forced into other categories with no explicit link to composition. To further mask important skill domains affecting higher order learning, the reading foundations are placed after the text comprehension standards, implying that they are secondary to, incidental to, or less deserving of instructional emphasis than the literary and informational text reading standards. Although advancement of reading comprehension and engagement of students with high-quality texts is obviously a worthy goal, the educational path to that goal is by no means clear from the organization of the CCSS document."}

"The U.S. military has long been at the forefront of research into applications of technology for the training of military personnel. Douglas Noble points out in his book The Classroom Arsenal that U.S. military expenditures on educational technology research far exceed what civilian agencies spend...When computer-based education was introduced into schools, much of the military mind-set came with it. Computers were seen as an efficient way for children to learn basic skills, using drill-and-practice programs that still account for a large proportion of school computer use. The military's need for swift information processing and decision-making lies behind the emphasis on using computer programs to develop problem-solving and decision-making skills-skills that are sometimes assessed purely in terms of successful computer use....And, as in society as a whole, the willingness to embrace computer technology in schools has consequences that extend well beyond the mere fact of its use....When children learn to use a computer, they are not just learning a skill. They are changing the relation between themselves and the world around them."
-Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement, The Child and the Machine: how computers put our children's education at risk, 2000, page 10-11.

"The computer is the totem of the post-industrial 'revolution' in education and computer literacy is the passport to its rewards. What is more astonishing even than the number of tracts about computer literacy is their conformity and predictability. Each chants a familiar litany about a new kind of learning that is individualised, student-centered, active, experiential and so on. We want to focus here on computer literacy only in the context of social control. In order to do this we shall begin by exploring the concepts of learning, knowledge and the mind which inform this messianic doctrine. The fundamental premise is that of cybernetics: the axiomatic belief that the human mind funtions like, or as, a computational machine.
This approach privileges rational procedures, goal-directed behaviour and cognitive structures. It emphasises that problem-solving skills entail solving problems through 'algorithmic thinking'...the development of computer skills is very much conceptualised within a process-oriented model for the curriculum which emphasises the development of information handling and problem-solving skills....The current obsession with skills, competences, process learning, and so on, is a further stage in the normalising 'scientific' discourse of cognitive development. Its achievement is a conception of the student or trainee as an information processing machine."
-Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry, 1989, page 225-26, 229.

"But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments...one could bring up different children according to different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese....The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them. The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms....Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behavior; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised."
-Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison, 1979, page 203-04.


_{This paper sets out to give a brief overview of the most compelling ethical and social implications of biometrics. It is based on several years of research funded by the Dutch organization for scientific research (NWO), and the EC funded Support Action Biometric Identification Technologies and Ethics (BITE). First, the issue of the status of biometric data is discussed, and second, it is argued that biometrics are an instance of the wider phenomenon of the contemporary redefinition of the body in terms of information, or the informatization of the body. In the third section, the implications of the arguments so far are drawn out by highlighting the ways in which biometric applications are caught in a series of paradoxes and tensions relating to identification, social categorization, surveillance, and democratic control.}