This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through (self-) disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance.
The purpose of the Panopticon is to produce docile inmates. But instead of inmates, a powerful impact of the censorship system is that it creates a class of docile citizens who are loyal to the government (the concept of loyalty will be explored next). On an everyday basis, these citizens do not actively seek to dissent, which is partially because they have a preconceived notion that the government is constantly watching them. They have personally seen and learned that transgressors who go against the government are punished rather severely. Next, the internalization of disciplinary individuality has taught citizens to self-monitor themselves even in the absence of a guard-like agent. In effect, this produces a society in which citizens are deterred form going against the government, disciplined to act based on what is appropriate, and are willing to self-censor their own behavior on the Internet and in the media.
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