The rapid explosion of information technologies in recent years has contributed to a substantive change in the social dimensions of information-sharing, and is forcing us to revise substantially our old assumptions regarding the knowledge/power dynamic. In this article, we discuss a range of strategic information-management options available to individuals and institutions in the networked society, and contrast these ‘blueprints’ to Foucault’s well-known panopticon model. We organize these observations and analyses within a new conceptual framework based on the geometry of ‘information flux’, or the premise that the net flow of information between an individual and a network is as relevant to power dynamics as the nature or volume of that information. Based on this geometrical model, we aim to develop a lexicon for the design, description and critique of socio-technical systems.

This article critiques a number of recent attempts to outline a contemporary theory of panoptic surveillance. It argues that an updated Foucaultian thesis must take into consideration the decentered and networked aspects of information technologies in an attempt to explain how consumer `choice' is shaped by both rewards and punishments. Drawing upon the work of Foucault, Varela, Deleuze and Guattari, a diagrammatic theory of surveillance is developed, one that questions the interconnection between consumer, sales, distribution, and production data.

The article outlines the contours of an emerging sub-field within media and cultural studies — communication geography. It is argued that post-industrial society nurtures a regime of hyperspace-biased communication, which generates spatial ambiguities tied to mobility, convergence and interactivity. These ambiguities call for a spatial turn within media studies — a turn which implies a problematization of the space—communication nexus, through which communication can be understood as the production and becoming of space. Following Henri Lefebvre, the term `texture is advanced as a potential cornerstone for the geography of communication. The concept refers to the communicative fabric that mediates between the structural properties of space and the spatial or communicative practices that (re)produce space. Textural analysis holds the potential to go beyond the duality of transmission and ritual views of communication, as well as to take the material geographies of communication into closer consideration.

This paper focuses on institutional currency transactions as a global lifeform that inhabits technology during waking hours, is distributed across the three major time zones, and is nonetheless centered in and on itself - the lifeform constituted by the respective markets and participants in them. We argue that distribution and centering are not at odds with each other in the lifeform of these markets; that notions of interactions and networks embracing all social domains give short shrift to the actual realization of the networks - as centered post-network spheres at odds with the idea of distantiated units or nodes connected only by business linkages and social relationships. The paper also submits that the notion of technology as an external artifact or infrastructure carrying information flows distracts from the world-constitutive role of a particular component of this technology, the screen, and `appresentational' work of traders and a secondary information supply economy that create this world.

The article takes its point of departure in one limited and consciously selected aspect of Michel Foucault's use of Jeremy Bentham's concept of `Panopticon': in his book Discipline and Punish, the aspect of surveillance, and the emphasis on a fundamental change and break which presumably occurred in the 1800s from social and theatrical arrangements, where the many saw the few, to modern surveillance activities where the few see the many. It is maintained that Foucault contributes in an important way to our understanding of and sensitivity regarding modern surveillance systems and practices, which are expanding at an accelerating rate, but that he overlooks an opposite process of great significance which has occurred simultaneously and at an equally accelerated rate: the mass media, and especially television, which today bring the many — literally hundreds of millions of people at the same time — with great force to see and admire the few. In contrast to Foucault's panoptical process, the latter process is referred to as synoptical. Together, the processes situate us in a viewer society in a two-way and double sense. This article explores the developmental parallels and relationships between Panopticon and Synopticon, as well as their reciprocal functions. It is maintained that the control and discipline of the `soul', that is, the creation of human beings who control themselves through self-control and who thus fit neatly into a so-called democratic capitalist society, is a task which is actually fulfilled by modern Synopticon, whereas Foucault saw it as a function of Panopticon.