Synoptic Surveillance: Mathiesen’s Synopticon

Last Updated on August 31, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Thomas Mathiesen’s synopticon describes a society in which the many watch the few — the reverse of the panopticon, where the few watch the many. Four things you need:

1. Mathiesen proposed the synopticon in 1997 as a counterpart to Foucault’s panopticon, not a replacement for it
2. The mechanism is the mass media, which bring millions of people to watch a small number of others
3. Applied to crime control, it raises the question of whether ordinary people can now watch the powerful
4. Mathiesen’s own view was that the synopticon reinforces control rather than resisting it — which is where most revision summaries get him wrong

Synoptic surveillance is examined within crime control and prevention in the crime and deviance module, on Paper 3. It is most often used as an evaluation of Foucault’s theory of surveillance.

Mathiesen and the viewer society: the many watch the few

Thomas Mathiesen was a Norwegian sociologist and criminologist at the University of Oslo. His article ‘The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon” Revisited’ appeared in the second issue of Theoretical Criminology in 1997, and it has become one of the most cited pieces the journal has published.

His starting point is a disagreement with Foucault about history.

Foucault argued that something broke in the early nineteenth century. Before it, societies were organised around spectacle — public executions, processions, theatre — in which the many watched the few. After it, they were organised around surveillance, in which the few watch the many. The panopticon is Foucault’s model of the second arrangement.

Mathiesen accepts that the surveillance half of this is real and expanding. What he denies is that the older arrangement disappeared. He argues that the exact opposite process was accelerating at the same time, and Foucault simply did not look at it: the mass media, and above all television, which brings enormous numbers of people to watch a very small number of others.

He calls this the synopticon, from the Greek for seeing together, and the society it produces the viewer society.

The two systems run side by side. Millions of people sit watching the same broadcast while cameras and records track them going about the rest of their lives. Mathiesen’s claim is that panopticon and synopticon developed in parallel, reinforcing one another, and that you cannot understand modern control by looking at only one of them.

Panopticon and synopticon compared

	Panopticon (Foucault)	Synopticon (Mathiesen)
Who watches whom	The few watch the many	The many watch the few
Proposed by	Michel Foucault, 1975, drawing on Bentham’s 1791 prison design	Thomas Mathiesen, 1997, in response to Foucault
The mechanism	Prisons, schools, workplaces, CCTV, records	Mass media, above all television
Effect on the watched	Self-discipline, because observation might be happening	Attention and admiration directed at a small number of public figures
Relationship between them	—	Not a replacement. Mathiesen argued both grew together and reinforce each other

The last row is the one students most often get wrong. The synopticon is not the panopticon’s successor and it is not its opposite in the sense of cancelling it out. Mathiesen’s argument is that they are two halves of the same development.

What Mathiesen actually meant by it

Most A-level summaries — including the earlier version of this post — present the synopticon as surveillance from below, a way for ordinary citizens to control the powerful. That is a fair application of the idea, and it is examinable. It is not quite what Mathiesen argued.

The few being watched in his account are largely media figures: politicians as television personalities, celebrities, people made visible by broadcasting. His word for what the audience does is not scrutinise but admire. His view was that the synopticon works with the panopticon to produce compliance — the media shape what people think and want, and a population shaped in that way is easier to govern.

So the synopticon in Mathiesen is a mechanism of control, not of resistance.

Use both readings. The A-level application below is legitimate and gets marks. Knowing that Mathiesen himself was more pessimistic than the textbook version gets you an evaluation point almost nobody else in the room will have.

Synoptic surveillance and public control of the police

The best-known application of the idea is the public filming of police officers.

In March 1991 Rodney King was stopped by police in Los Angeles after a car chase and beaten by officers at the roadside. A resident filmed the beating from a nearby balcony and passed the tape to a local television station. When four officers were acquitted at the state trial in April 1992, the verdict triggered six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Two of the four were later convicted on federal civil rights charges in 1993.

In May 2020 George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis after a police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes. Again a bystander filmed it, and the footage circulated worldwide within hours. Derek Chauvin was convicted in April 2021 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, and sentenced to 22 and a half years. He later received a separate federal sentence of just over 20 years for violating Floyd’s civil rights, to run concurrently.

Taken together the two cases suggest something has changed. In 1991 the footage was unusual, took days to reach an audience, and did not secure a conviction at the first attempt. In 2020 the footage was ordinary, reached the world in hours, and the outcome was a murder conviction. Filming the police has become normal, and the consequences have become serious.

Formal recording has expanded alongside the informal kind. Body-worn video is now standard issue in most forces in England and Wales, which complicates the picture — the camera is pointed by the officer, not at them.

HOWEVER, this bottom-up scrutiny can still be blocked by conventional policing. Cameras and phones can be confiscated, people filming can be moved on under public order powers, and a recording only has an effect if somebody is willing to publish it.

A precision point. Citizens filming the police is more accurately described as sousveillance — a term coined by Steve Mann in 2003 from the French sous, meaning from below, as the opposite of sur, from above. Mathiesen’s synopticon is about mass media audiences; sousveillance is about individuals recording those in authority. A-level textbooks tend to fold the second into the first. Distinguishing them is worth a sentence in an essay.

Synoptic surveillance and public control of politicians

The second application concerns political elites.

John B. Thompson argued in Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (2000) that the media have transformed what visibility means for people in public life. Politicians now operate in a permanent state of potential exposure, and the fear that damaging material may surface acts as a constraint on their behaviour. On Thompson’s account, scandal matters because reputation and trust are the resources political careers run on.

If Thompson is right, the synopticon does something Foucault’s model does not predict. Foucault’s disciplinary power is directed downwards, at populations. Media visibility is directed upwards, at people who would otherwise be difficult to hold to account.

A UK example is the case of Chris Huhne, the former energy secretary who was jailed for eight months in 2013, alongside his former wife Vicky Pryce, for perverting the course of justice over speeding points. The prosecution followed press reporting rather than a police investigation.

HOWEVER, exposure is not the same as control. Being watched constrains politicians only where the audience can impose a cost, and there are plenty of recent cases where visibility produced a news cycle and nothing else. It also works unevenly: those with money and lawyers are far better placed to manage what becomes visible than anyone else.

Evaluating the synopticon

In its favour, the synopticon identifies a genuine gap in Foucault. Foucault’s model has power flowing in one direction. Anyone who has watched a piece of phone footage change the course of a criminal case knows that visibility now runs both ways.

It fits the digital period better than the analogue one. Mathiesen was writing about television, before social media. The mechanism he described has intensified: the many now watch the few continuously and can also broadcast, which television audiences could not.

However, it is a top-down account of the media. Later criminologists have argued that Mathiesen treats audiences as passive receivers, gives no real place to resistance or to alternative media, and does not anticipate the internet at all. Aaron Doyle made this case in Theoretical Criminology in 2011, revisiting the article in the light of Web 2.0.

Marxists would argue the synopticon does not deliver what its optimistic reading promises. Media ownership is concentrated, and outlets are unlikely to run sustained scrutiny of interests they share. The many may watch the few, but somebody else decides which few.

Postmodernists would point out that visibility no longer settles anything. Where footage can be denied, contested or generated artificially, being seen doing something is not the same as being held responsible for it.

And it does not fix the imbalance. Occasional exposure of the powerful sits alongside continuous, automated surveillance of everyone else. Actuarial justice and digital surveillance and predictive policing are both directed downwards, and both have grown faster than anything pointing the other way.

How the synopticon comes up in AQA Paper 3

The synopticon is rarely the whole question. It is almost always the evaluation.

In a 30-mark essay on crime control and prevention, the standard move is to set out Foucault on surveillance and self-discipline, then bring in Mathiesen as the criticism: Foucault describes only half of what is happening, because the many also watch the few. Actuarial justice and the evidence on CCTV then complete the evaluation.

In a 10-mark question with an item, an item mentioning the media, mobile phones or public scrutiny is inviting you to use this material. Both points must be taken from the item — see the exams and past papers page for the difference between the two 10-mark question types.

In theory questions, Mathiesen belongs with post and late modern criminology, since his argument is about how control changes as media saturate everyday life.

Two things get credit here that most answers miss: knowing that Mathiesen proposed the synopticon as a companion to the panopticon rather than a replacement for it, and knowing that his own conclusion was pessimistic.

A level sociology revision bundle for sale

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle.

It contains

• 12 exam practice questions including short answer, 10 mark and essay question exemplars.
• 32 pages of revision notes covering the entire A-level sociology crime and deviance specification
• Seven colour mind maps covering sociological perspective on crime and deviance

Signposting and related posts

This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course, specification 7192, examined on Paper 3.

The synopticon only makes sense against the theory it responds to. Read Foucault on the panopticon and disciplinary power first if you have not already.

For where surveillance has gone since, see actuarial justice and risk management and security, surveillance and crime control in digital society.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com