Meanings
- uncountableThe state or quality of being panoptic; all-seeingness.
I cannot help but follow such panopticism to its ultimate conclusion: a Nineteen Eighty-Four scenario.
2008, Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, Routledge, →ISBN, page 692 more examples
The goal of police panopticism is to minimize the severe costs of managing the police by leveraging data-driven surveillance from multiple institutional points and actors.
2012 March, Mary D. Fan, “Panopticism for Police: Structural Reform Bargaining and Police Regulation by Data-Driven Surveillance”, in Washington Law Review, volume 87, number 93, page 102Today's panopticism (in the West, at least) hasn't had anything like this effect, as Angwin notes, because it can be quite crude in displaying its own invasive footprints: You shop for cameras online, and then find yourself haunted for weeks by camera ads each time you visit a new website.
2014, Clive Thompson, "Whose Life Is It Anyway?", BookForum, February/March 2014, page 12
Origin
Cite this entry
panopticism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/panopticism
“panopticism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/panopticism. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “panopticism,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/panopticism.
Source: panopticism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.