Page 151 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

140 • Sport, Media and Society

collections of rare and exceptional artefacts that characterised the ‘cabinets of curi-
osity’ of previous centuries, the new museums were rationalised, ordered and un-
derpinned by a logic of historical development which moved chronologically from
the past to a triumphant present (Bennett 1995: 2). The museum became a ‘show-
case for key modern ideas about the hierarchical ordering and logical progression of
knowledge, identity and culture’ (Dicks 2003: 147). Museums enforced the logic of
colonialism by displaying the transition from ‘simple and traditional to complex and
modern societies, propagating the message that “traditional” societies were colo-
nized for their own good in order to modernize them’ (Dicks 2003: 147). These hi-
erarchical displays of other cultures created the viewing public as knowing subjects,
complicit in the ordering of the world according to the rhetoric of imperialism.
Simultaneously, museums made visitors aware that they were the subject of sur-
veillance themselves. Bennett (1995) argued that the exhibitions of the nineteenth
century were also part of the disciplinary society. The Crystal Palace, built to house
the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London, was designed so that ‘while everyone could
see, there were also vantage points from which everyone could be seen, thus com-
bining the functions of spectacle and surveillance’ (Bennett 1995: 65). Instruction
booklets sought to discipline the potentially troublesome working-class visitor into
appropriate behaviour by advising on dress and demeanour (Bennett 1995: 73). The
location of museums was also part of a strategy to civilise the masses. Bennett (1995:
87) noted that museums were typically placed at the centre of cities, standing there
as ‘embodiments, both material and symbolic, of a power to “show and tell” which,
in being deployed in a newly constituted open and public space, sought rhetorically
to incorporate the people within the processes of the state’.

Power–Knowledge and the Museum

Rose (2007) suggested that the following concepts derived from the work of Foucault
(1977) were useful in approaching the analysis of museums: the panopticon, surveil-
lance, institutional apparatuses and institutional technologies. The panopticon was
Jeremy Bentham’s design for a revolutionary new prison architecture in 1791. He
suggested that it could be used as model for all kinds of institutions such as hospitals,
workhouses, schools and madhouses. The prison consisted of a tall tower surrounded
by cells whose single occupants were always visible from a central tower. While oc-

cupants of cells could be seen, the officers in the guard tower remained invisible; thus
prisoners could never be certain when someone was watching them. The effect of
this architectural arrangement was for prisoners to internalise the gaze of the warden.
The prisoners adopted a subjectivity of surveillance, altering their behaviour in a
way that resulted in the production of docile bodies. Foucault (1977) argued that this
internal regulation, operating through the constant fear of surveillance, has become
the principal way in which contemporary societies are organised.