Peter Bradwell
Researcher
Peter Bradwell is a researcher at Demos. He is interested in digital identity, technology and the ways that information and knowledge is shared...
at 12:01pm
on Friday, 25th May 2007
...how many search results for my personality came back?
We ran a roundtable discussion yesterday here at Demos for the FYI project. It was fantastic morning, and many thanks to those that came along.
What a gift of a headline the Independent gave us to kick off the morning: "Google is watching you..." They reported on Google big man Eric Schmidt's suggeston that they ultimately want users to be able to ask questions such as: 'what job should I take' and 'what shall i do tomorrow?'
It echoes something he said at the PDF conference last week (which we blogged here, here and here). In conversation with Thomas Freidman - who really could have given him a harder time on this I think - he envisaged a time when Google had such a picture of its users that, upon being late to work, your computer would say - 'hey Eric, you're late for work - but then, you're always late'.
I don't think I was alone in having to wipe cold sweat from my brow - I've seen Robocop, so I know how this ends. With me having dropped the weapon but the computer still blowing me out of a window. That said, I'm certainly not dystopian in how I envisage the potential of the tools to map our behaviour and feed it back. But there are some serious questions to be asked about how the assumptions and suggestions about our behaviour, tastes and personality in turn influence us, our relationships and behaviour. There's an obtuse but special little article, 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' by Gilles Delueze that, in 1990, was pretty visionary in spotting some of the challenges this environment throws up (although, as I say - it is written in rather obtuse, esoteric language...!)
It's not good enough to recoil in horror at the unofficial big brothers (so wait - it isn't just the government looking to exploit databases of information about us?) nor to celebrate the smoothing of internet space into a perfect-fit personal offer. Google play the neutral card quite well at the moment - they're an optional service; we can choose not to listen to their advice. But I'm not sure how much longer we will see search engines just as providers of information, as we recognise that they actively sort it, interpret it, and manage it for us. Not a new observation, but its one that we can forget. And it's not necessarily the end of the world, but its certainly worth remembering when we're figuring out the implications.
We probably spent too much time yesterday morning talking of the risks and dangers. There are countless benefits to information sharing, to the mapping of our bahaviour, and to the personised offers that giving away details about ourselves entails. But there's a fuzzy area where the open, social negotiation of that information meets profiling and influence. I don't get it yet, but there's something in there...
We ran a roundtable discussion yesterday here at Demos for the FYI project. It was fantastic morning, and many thanks to those that came along.
What a gift of a headline the Independent gave us to kick off the morning: "Google is watching you..." They reported on Google big man Eric Schmidt's suggeston that they ultimately want users to be able to ask questions such as: 'what job should I take' and 'what shall i do tomorrow?'
It echoes something he said at the PDF conference last week (which we blogged here, here and here). In conversation with Thomas Freidman - who really could have given him a harder time on this I think - he envisaged a time when Google had such a picture of its users that, upon being late to work, your computer would say - 'hey Eric, you're late for work - but then, you're always late'.
I don't think I was alone in having to wipe cold sweat from my brow - I've seen Robocop, so I know how this ends. With me having dropped the weapon but the computer still blowing me out of a window. That said, I'm certainly not dystopian in how I envisage the potential of the tools to map our behaviour and feed it back. But there are some serious questions to be asked about how the assumptions and suggestions about our behaviour, tastes and personality in turn influence us, our relationships and behaviour. There's an obtuse but special little article, 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' by Gilles Delueze that, in 1990, was pretty visionary in spotting some of the challenges this environment throws up (although, as I say - it is written in rather obtuse, esoteric language...!)
It's not good enough to recoil in horror at the unofficial big brothers (so wait - it isn't just the government looking to exploit databases of information about us?) nor to celebrate the smoothing of internet space into a perfect-fit personal offer. Google play the neutral card quite well at the moment - they're an optional service; we can choose not to listen to their advice. But I'm not sure how much longer we will see search engines just as providers of information, as we recognise that they actively sort it, interpret it, and manage it for us. Not a new observation, but its one that we can forget. And it's not necessarily the end of the world, but its certainly worth remembering when we're figuring out the implications.
We probably spent too much time yesterday morning talking of the risks and dangers. There are countless benefits to information sharing, to the mapping of our bahaviour, and to the personised offers that giving away details about ourselves entails. But there's a fuzzy area where the open, social negotiation of that information meets profiling and influence. I don't get it yet, but there's something in there...
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