Auto-regulating New Media

Lee, T. (2001) Auto-regulating New Media. Australian Journal of Communication, 28 (1). pp. 43-56.

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Abstract

Using Foucault's (1977, 1978) notion of panoptic method of governmentality and looking at the case of Singapore's Internet policy, this paper attempts to expand on the idea-and ideals-of 'auto-regulation'(Lee, 2000, pp. 4-5; Lee & Birch, 2000). Auto-regulation, as I shall posit in this paper, provides a way for regulatory enforcement and surveillance to become sufficiently transparent and 'normalised' so that 'the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole'(Foucault, 1977, pp.207-208) rather than by a select group of policy and law enforcement officers, or civil society /activist groups.