| abstract
| - Geosurveillance, a term used by some of Michel Foucault's allies (although Foucault himself never expressly used the term in any of his works). It is concerning Foucault's use of Jeremy Bentham's work the Panopticon, in his now classic work Discipline and Punish where Foucault uses Bentham's work as a metaphor for modern society's ever increasing dependence and need for disciplinary society and surveillance. It is important to note that the concept of Geosurveillance falls into at least three categories: (1) Groups, such as prison populations and (2) the general or mass population. It is a surveillance system for mass population observation and is not concerned with class relations as in modern Marxism or bureaucracy and administration as in Max Weber. Geosurveillance can be defined as "the surveillance of geographical activities."Geography, space, time, territories and mass populations (and therefore surveillance) may be viewed as progress towards efficient administration. In Weber's view point, this presents a benefit for the development of Western capitalism and the modern nation state.(3) An interesting analysis on the brain and its interpretation on fear and its relationship to the environment that the brain has viewed as dangerous to its survival (the organisms survival). And also in consideration as a wider version of this is the brain’s area of operations in regards fear, which is Dopamine, Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Dopamine (it is a hormone) forms as a neurotransmitter and has many functions within the brain such as, motivation, (it also acts an important role in teaching signals to parts of the brain and rewards outcome) cognition, mood, learning. The Hippocampus forms vital information in regards the brain's spatial encoding, memory, and recognition. Much of this material is very much new and little is understood and used and is better suited to an audience who is into thought provoking ideas and wants to be challenged intellectually but not polemically. Before digesting any of this excellent material, one should ponder a few questions into accepted notions on surveillance. Now, according to Foucault all ideas have a tendency to become normalised no matter what their content. What does he mean? At first, this does not seem to be a straightforward answer but if we look more closely, we find the meaning of what he says straightforwardly enough. He means that once an idea gains accepted practice (and becomes hidden from those who practice it) there is a social process that puts into practice normalisation procedures. Once that procedure is enacted upon, normalisation begins (see Discipline and Punish pp.177-184). So it should be remembered that global totalitarianism cannot be accomplished in one place because of the global village in which humans now live, it has to be global, hence the replacement of the nation-state and such others. What is replaced is not entry (gaining access) but absence of exit "which would render the very notion of exit meaningless." So instead of what was meant to reforming and rehabilitate (rather erroneously) the original offender (prison inmate) "Within this new normalization paradigm, progressive efforts, in many American prisons, have turned to improving the quality of program delivery, and experimentation with operational and programmatic modifications directed toward increasing inmate adjustment within safe and humane prisons, while simultaneously reducing the recidivism rate." Prisons have now become society's way of producing recidivist, in which the recidivist repeats his "crimes" goes back into the general population only to re offend. A staggering 67.5% are rearrested within three years. Out of 272,111, 183,675 were rearrested. (See parole later in the article).
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