INTERNET AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE CASE OF THE CEBU PRISON EXPERIMENT

This article deals with a unique project now ongoing at the Cebu Prison in the Philippines. This institution has been hailed on the Internet where recently a number of musical clips featuring hundreds of prisoners performing a variety of dances have been aired. In this paper we analyzed the visual texts of the twenty most popular clips disseminated on the Youtube website, and we inferred on theories of social control, mainly focusing on Erving Goffman concepts of Total Institution and Michel Foucault’s concepts of Modern Panopticon and docile forms of social control.