At a recent lecture at which I described some of the characteristics
of today's online reality, a member of my audience, an aging, but far from old,
woman, vehemently burst out with a lengthy diatribe. I had noted that in our
constantly connected world we are constantly being bombarded with new and additional
information, much of it posted online by non-experts. This woman, who had sit
quietly throughout the first part of my presentation, was suddenly unable to
contain herself. In a drawn-out monologue she blurted out that she didn't have
time for all of this, let alone any interest in it. I attempted to explain to
her that the fact that so many people were posting so much information on the
web didn't actually oblige her to read any of it. But this didn't seem to calm
her, and she continued her rant until a number of other audience members asked
her to stop.
This woman's rant initiated a
series of reflections on my part. It just didn't seem to make sense. I found
myself wondering what was it about the banal act of clicking (or for that matter,
not clicking) on almost random links that could generate in her, as it seems
to do with so many others, a feeling that the pages she visited, or refused
to visit, were somehow being directed precisely toward her? Maybe I'm an exception,
but when I've been informed, even in the boldest of
capital letters, that because I'm the exact millionth visitor to a particular
site and thus eligible for a special prize, I never assumed that that particular
advertisement was actually being directly precisely
toward me. And that being the case, it's hard to think that there's much
reason for me to take personal offense toward something I encounter on the web.
True, we've been told, time after time, that the internet
ushered in an era of personalized content, but when we attempt to analyze the
true intent of those claims, we realize that we're basically being told that
via our television we get the programming that someone determined is fitting
for an amorphous and faceless "we", while on the web each "I"
can choose precisely which program he or she want to waste his or her time with.
Clicking on a link is rather unavoidably an individual activity, but so is clicking
on the remote control of a television. Contrary to the hype, the internet is
a mass medium, and though the specific experience of each surfer as he
or she clicks from page to page may be different in its details, the overall
experience for most web surfers is almost interchangeable - and far
from personal. It may no longer be "one size fits all", but all
those sizes rarely seem to suggest a qualitative difference. And from within
a reality of this sort, there's little reason to assume that something on the
web is really meant for me, and even less reason to take personal offence
at something that hardly knows I'm there at all.
A reasonable claim can be made that in the days before the internet dominated
our computer use and dwarfed all the other activities we may have done with
them, many of us developed a personal rapport with our computers. I even claimed,
over ten years ago, that our computer had become
part of the family. But back then it was perhaps possible to find different
qualities among the various computers we encountered, though writing this is
undoubtedly an exaggeration, perhaps made somewhat legitimate by the novelty
of our first computers. Probably few, if any, of us named our computers in the
manner that B.B. King named his guitar, but if we sat in front of different
computers we may have noticed that they differed in the programs they held,
or the add-ons that gave them a distinct flavor. We had to get used to the feel
of the keyboard, and of course somebody else's computer didn't hold our files.
If, however, there really was a time such as this in the dawn of the PC age,
surely it has long ago passed.
Not quite as long ago as that, however, one of the qualities
that made our computers distinct from those of others we might frequent were
the games we stored on them. These perhaps permitted us to feel that there really
was something personal about our computers. But as more and more relatively
simple (and even rather complex) games became available online, and for free,
this "personal" aspect also became relegated to the past. And of course
many of today's most popular games have become social or interactive. They can't
be played without an internet connection, meaning that here as well we witness
a reduction in the "personal" qualities of our computers. Many, even
most, people still don't use (or perhaps even know of) online office tools like
Google Docs - their word processed files still sit on their hard drives as though
that's the only place they might possibly reside. But the same can't really
be said for photographs. Sites like Flickr and Picasaweb have come close to
becoming the standard for these, further depersonalizing the PC. Frankly, if
we still hear the term PC today we may even have to
remind ourselves that the acronym once actually had meaning. There's something
presumptuous, even oxymoronic, in referring to the box that sits by our desks
and allows us to connect to the world as being "personal". The name
seems to be the only part that's really left of a long-gone era. It's a name
that holds a great deal of history, but it hardly fits today's computers.
Nobody is waiting for us to come visit a site, opening the
door, asking us what's new, expressing concern about our health. When we get
"personal" assistance it's to make a sale, putting the classic phrase
about psychotherapy, the purchase of friendship (hey, I've
mentioned that book before), on its head, while maintaining essentially
the same meaning. What we have via our personal valets is "friendship"
for purchase. I've yet to see a recommendation engine that tells me "maybe
you're not in the mood to buy anything today", or "there's nothing
new of late that merits your perusal". It's just not going to happen, and
not because a bot isn't capable of knowing whether
I've got an ear ache and don't want to hear music, or that I've already overspent
my budget this month, but because the "concern" that these bots express
toward us is completely impersonal.
Though T-shirts with the banner:
There's no place like 127.0.0.1have, perhaps justifiably, become cult classics, the belief that there's any real correlation between our IP and our identity is little more than wishful thinking. Or perhaps worse. Though of course it's done in jest, what we have here is a reification of the technology, a remaking of ourselves in the image of the machine. Perhaps the attempts in the early days of the internet to anonymize our web surfing weren't only for more banal reasons, but also to in some way make a declaration that we are distinct from our computers. Tools of this sort are still available, though I'm not sure that anyone besides hard core hackers use them, or even know about them. And perhaps we should be asking why, in an era in which we're well aware that governments are more than willing to keep their eyes on us, and have the technological means to do so, anonymizing tools of this sort are no longer popular. I'm willing to venture a relatively simply guess - most of us simply don't have a personal relationship with the internet such that they feel that their identity is really out there, susceptible to government, or other, surveillance.
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