The Beginnings of Digital Culture - Digital Culture - page 20

8 Advertisement for the Felt and Tarrant Comptometer, c . 1915.
The new free-floating individuals were no longer subject to the old
forms of power, and new decentralized techniques of control and
discipline were needed. Michel Foucault writes of the power of
examination and documentation as an essential part of the mecha-
nisms of discipline. 25 Subjects began to be defined by a 'whole
series of codes of disciplinary individuality that made it possible to
transcribe by means of homogenization the individual features by
the examination'. 26 This process, which enables 'the formalization of
the individual within power relations', makes it possible to 'classify,
form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms'. 27 It also allows
the circulation, comparison and transmission of such data, within
institutions and disciplines. This had two effects, the constitution
of the individual as a describable, analysable object and his or her
placing within a comparative system.
Through such means people became, for the purpose of social
control, discrete signs, both individual and homogenous, about
whom information could be transmitted, circulated, manipulated