In case you’re wondering, some giant media conglomerate beat me to the domain name hearst.com, so that wasn’t a possibility.

The name of this site is derived from panopticon, a word the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) used for the name of an ingenious new kind of prison he spent years devising in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The word comes from the Greek words for “all” and “sight.” As Bentham conceived it, the panopticon would be a kind of ultimate surveillance machine: Prison cells would be arrayed around the inside of a huge circular space, and a hidden sentry would observe from inside a single tower in the center of the space. The sentry would be able to see all the prisoners without being seen himself; the prisoners would never know if or when they were being monitored. Thus the prisoners would have to be on their best behavior at all times. The prisoners would be forced to internalize their own subjugation, and the sentry would be rendered more or less unnecessary. Bentham tried to get a panopticon built, but he was never quite successful. His ideas eventually influenced the design of prisons such as Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built in 1829. The concepts behind the panopticon also influenced the architecture of other kinds of institutional buildings, including some hospitals, which obviously have a similar need for efficient ways to monitor large numbers of people simultaneously.

Bentham conceived of the panopticon as a benign system that would result in prisons that were more humane, but of course its implications are hugely disturbing. Today the panopticon is famous mainly because of its analysis by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw it as an utterly diabolical concept and a metaphor for “the oppressive use of information in a modern disciplinary society,” as David Engberg puts it on a website called The Virtual Panopticon. For Foucault, whose analysis appears in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the panopticon concept also signaled a historical shift from “punishment” that targeted the body to “discipline” that targeted the mind and soul. I’ve oversimplified things here; you can read more about these ideas and their influence on this page.

Anyway, I’m interested in all these ideas, but they aren’t going to be the focus of this site. In the 19th century the word panopticon also came to be used as the name for a kind of hands-on museum where a wide variety of objects were on display, and that’s a suitably vague description of what this site will be. I’m very interested in the media in general and magazines in particular, so there will be a lot about that sort of thing here. I’m kind of a pack rat when it comes to magazines, so I’ll regularly be sharing things from my collection, including a number of inadvertently hilarious guitar magazines from the hair-metal era. Yngwie!