Panoptic what??

Here I am reading a book about studying the way people carry on discourses in our modern age. The point I just hit upon was worth thinking about. The authors (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) describe a traditional classroom as set up for optimal observation of the students. The term actually comes from a conceptual design for a prison. The idea put forth by some theorists is that schools and classrooms are laid out similarly to this panoptic philosophy behind the panopticon. Now, I realize that perhaps many students would agree with the idea that a classroom is like a prison...but that is not the primary point. The suggestion is sometimes made that with the Web 2.0 or new technologies, we move away from this all controlling, centralized on the teacher approach. Yet, one conversation I recently had during a Skype call with two researchers looking at new literacies (Lankshear and Knoble) was the concern of many that on the web, with youTube and blogs, we are actually creating a situation in which our lives are constatnly under surveillance. With period by period attendance reported to a database which can be viewed by parents online, even the right of each student to skip that boring class is being placed under surveillance (that was a tongue in cheek comment:)
So what is going on here...are we more under the watchful eye in the f2f classroom or online? My thoughts?? Its not about the classroom location. It is about the context. That is it is about the culture, mindset, beliefs, history, set-up of the context of interaction. Once again the role of technology as being different by its nature is overstated. Technology provides the opportunity for difference...it does not require it.
Soap box is done for today....tomorrow will actually go on a trip through an eLearning experience.
Explore on....
J:)