Enter the Panopticon

So I've been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. I've set up this damn blog, and now I've got to maintain it.

I first bestowed the name Panopticon on the hard drive of my old Macintosh laptop. But now that said laptop slumbers peacefully in electronic retirement, it's time I recycled the name. And it's far more suited to a blog, I think.

Pray, what is a 'panopticon', you ask? Astonishing the things you remember from your undergraduate days. It's a type of prison building, first designed in the late eighteenth century by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon was circular in construction, and allowed the jailer (located in the centre of the building) to view all the prisoners at all times, without the prisoners themselves knowing if they were being observed. This bestowed "invisible omniscience" on the jailer, "assuring a surveillance which [was] both global and individual."

[For more gripping facts on the Panopticon, get thee to Wikipedia.]

Needless to say, I find the concept of invisible omniscience extremely attractive. If this is to be my niche on the Internet, I suppose it's time I start surveying the world around me. For here, I am all-powerful. Muahahahaaa.

So here we go. I know I'm a lousy diarist, so I guess we'll see now if I'm a marginally better blogger.