Most of you have known about this aspect of Internet life for awhile now: everything we do is tracked, even in “incognito” mode and behind VPNs. And while some of the obvious indentifying bits of your transactions may be obscured by privacy tools most don’t even bother to use, everything we do is logged, categorized and analyzed down to the minute and individual, and across years and world-wide demographic groups. Any which way the data can be sliced, diced and sorted, it has and will be for the forseeable future. Data has been the gold-rush of the 21st century for several years now, and you’ve most likely started to sense the bubble of information that seems to follow you everywhere you go.
What on earth are you talking about?
By now, you’ve probably heard the term “algorithm” used to discuss various things, like search results, or page rankings, or advertising. Unless you happened to be immersed in a profession that deals with them all day long, you probably only have a vague sense of the impact algorithms have on your daily life. I could go on and on about how it works, but the easiest way to demonstrate how effective it is will be just to show you.
Assuming you have either a TikTok or YouTube account that you have used for at least a few months, try opening up a browser tab to either site while you are logged in, and another incognito tab while are not logged in. Even minimal use of an account will drastically change what the site presents to you on the front page. Now think about everywhere you log in: Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, Gmail, Instagram. All of them have extremely specific and voluminous data profiles on every aspect of how you use their site, and they are constantly feeding that data to algorithms that constantly inform what and how content is presented to you. While this can be pleasing or even comforting at first, it also has the knock-on effect of not showing us things we don’t want to see, even when it may be important for us to have that exposure. Humans, in their “default” state, will gravitate to what is comfortable and familiar, and the internet continues to reinforce this is as vicious, feedback loop that is definitely turning out to be detrimental to compassion, curiousity and emotional growth.
Interestingly enough, most data algorithms also seem to follow a well-known phenomenon known as the the “Observer’s Effect” where the properties of the observed object change just because it is being observed. You can be certain that the minute you try to poke at the algorithm surrounding you on a particular platform, it will definitely observe you observing it, and depending on that platform’s intent for your interactions with it, will alter itself to maybe make it less obvious that you are being manipulated. Now wrap your head around that and add the fact that nearly all of our “news” is coming from platforms that actively know you are watching and can adjust what you consume based on agendas that most likely involve monetization and not just sharing information, and you get a sense for just how far down the rabbit hole we have fallen.
Image courtesy of TAW4 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net