Almost 40 years after Foucault's comparison of society to the panopticon, "a terrifying, circular prison pierced in the centre by a single watchtower," Shannon Gormley writes for the Ottawa Citizen that we now live in the age of "the cyber panopticon...in which our every move--our every test score, growth spurt and parking ticket--is documented, analyzed and, sometimes, used against us by educational, medical and police bureaucracies." Gormley suggests that in this time of social networking and online sharing, "now we face a prisoner's dilemma...do we give up our information freely, or keep it private and hope that our friends and enemies will do the same?"
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