So, Lori Andrews has cemented my desire to delete my facebook. Honestly, if I didn't need it for the shameless promotion of my music page, it'd be gone. Unfortunately, that wouldn't really be the end of my problems.
Is it strange that I miss the old, clumsy, same-for-everyone internet? The internet that had totally aimless ads that had nothing to do with my lifestyle inserted in the side-banners of pages like ebaumsworld and stickdeath and all of the other meaningless joke sites I visited?
I lent my mom my computer for an afternoon, and suddenly my pages are filled with "singles over 50" ads and the like. Not that I have a particular problem with people who are single and over 50, but it the experience sort of brought to light something I've been trying to ignore - the disturbing personalization of the internet. Like Andrews noted, "personalization has given us a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue"(21 George Orwell... Mark Zuckerberg).
The world of the old internet was exciting because of its anonymity and its general constructs that all could experience equally. Someone in Britain would see the same thing on a web page as someone in Hawaii. Now, I could be in the same room with someone and have a completely different experience on a website if we're on different computers.
I see how the argument can be made for the convenience - personalization merely eliminates the things you aren't interested in and surrounds you with things more relevant and helpful to you.
But at what point does this non-elected personalization begin to shape your personhood?
The triangulate your preferences, personality, gender, age, location, and bombard you with images, text, sounds, ideas that they think fit you. There can only be so much psychological resistance to this kind of gradual and constant coercion. After seeing the same ads (in my case, they're usually music/instrument related) on every webpage I visit, the same targeted ads, it seeps in from the periphery until suddenly I'm on ebay and I'm buying a looping station for $370 (a steal!) even though I've never used effects pedals with my music, and I have NO IDEA how to use a damn looping station (the damn thing has 7 pedals on it).
Also, I have no income.
So now owe my best friend $370 because Ebay wouldn't take my debit card and he has a paypal account which he let me use, I still can't make passable music on the damn pedal, and I see even MORE ads for similar products on every webpage I visit.
Anyways, my personal case aside, I completely agree with the sentiment (as expressed in Lori Andrews' piece) that the internet, the once golden public sphere of the future, is now being used as a tool to further isolate and separate people's experiences, forcing them into cookie-crafted web-identities for the sake of more accurate and affective marketing,
-James G.
James, I like your point here about customization (or personalization), encapsulated very well in your question "But at what point does this non-elected personalization begin to shape your personhood?" You are right to suspect that customization is not simply about tailoring one's online experience to the preexisting, already complete "you"... that it does, in fact, play a part in shaping who you are what you might become (or buy!). The anecdote about lending your computer to your mother suggests that it might be instructive (if a bit embarrassing) to swap computers with other people, to foreground the amount of targeted marketing that occurs.
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