Friday, February 27, 2004

Derek said: is creating fictious people and controlling every aspect of their life turning people into introverted control freaks?

Control is an intersting concept. Foucault wrote a book titled Discipline and Punish. Only Foucault was French and "Discipline" is the translation. Foucault's word was Surveiller. One sided surveilance, the translators argue, is a mechanism of power relations, the ability to control through seeing w/out being seen. I think this is an interesting analogy for the web in general. The one-sided anonymous surveillance. It's why people have pet blogs they check daily, for no real reason. In this sense, I think the Sims has nothing to do with people turning into control freaks. Instead, I'd argue, people have always been "surveillers," that is, control freaks, and the Sims has managed to allow them to do it without actually controling any "body".

Paul Medenwaldt

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