Your identity is what search engines say it is (cf. advice from senior academics to young academics: be careful what you post online. Also: M. Gregg's response)
This might not seem different than identity has ever been, i.e. reputation always has made identity extimate in just that way (an effect of the outside).
The difference with search engines is that they not only have cultural capital (analogous to a very reputable source ruining the reputation of someone with less cultural capital and therefore fewer means to fight back), they exist within a system that codes them as neutral, objective, informational, algorithmic.
Showing posts with label personhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personhood. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
WEB BEACONS
[web beacons, defn.: http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/webbeacons/details.html]
Web beacons are small electronic files that, e.g., Yahoo! uses to produce quantitative data about site use, including accessing certain cookies stored on the user's computer in order to provide "personalized" experience searching (meaning, in practice, serve up ads that are more likely to be clicked on and to produce revenue for Yahoo and its advertisers).
This file can be embedded anywhere on a page: in a banner ad, an image, etc. Yahoo! also embeds beacons in its html email messages so they know which emails were opened and which were not.
So beacons area way for them to provide data for themselves and their partners about how effective advertising is on their site. They help them make sales pitches to potential, new advertisers, retain old clients, and track their own business internally. Beacons help Yahoo! make more money from ad revenue, and drive ad revenue (from the other direction) by improving the "relevancy" of their search engine.
The goal of "personalization" that beacons serve runs into the issue of personhood that I wrote about yesterday: what kind of encounter is it to encounter a version of oneself given back via "personalized" features of a search engine, where those features are always advertisements that try to predict, based on your searches, what you might like to buy, what you might need, what you might aspire to own and wear and incorporate into your person. So in the technical definition of a web beacon, beacons are a technology that produces an encounter with oneself, where that encounter has a particular, split quality: 1. one encounters the results of one's search, which involves a complicated interaction with results that are often not the results one wanted, and that then demands successive retoolings in order to have the search results more accurately and helpfully mirror the desire one brought into the search; 2. and one encounters the advertisements served up as a result of one's search, which, on google, for instance, are the result of a real-time auction in which advertisers bid to be the one whose ad shows up in a search for any given word, and where the searcher, as a result, has to live with the funny mirror of the version of oneself that gets returned when one's search (desire, wish, curiosity, question) causes advertisements and the companies behind them to make educated guesses about who that person IS or WANTS TO BE based on the way that search term aggregates the searcher with other searchers who searched the same term and subsequently purchased a particular item. One finds oneself as a reflection assembled from bits of knowledge that line up, that mirror, only as well as the search term bids them to. And one finds oneself as a reflection of a statistical aggregate, a public whose coherence lies in the data that a company can collect about (what Battelle calls) intention, how the intention to find a certain piece of information correlates with the intention to buy certain products.
Note: the coherence of biopolitical populations is in the physiognomic and sociological traits that form the basis for ascribed identity AND in the goal of a biopolitical power to organize those populations in a particular way, allotting shares of the common (Ranciere), allotting state resources, marking boundaries and territorial lines in ways that benefit some and harm others (managing life). [check this: how does a biopoliticized population cohere? through what means? by what principles of unity?]
Ads on search engines manage life in a different way, with different goals, but no less intensely. Maybe "encounter" names some aspect of this other way of managing life, thus, a concept that is collaborative with "biopolitics," but not the same. Google et al manage life in the way advertising and marketing and capitalism in general have always tried to manage life [cf. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism], with this enormous shift: it does its work by attaching itself to the process of searching, wanting, finding out, desiring, seeking, being curious, being ignorant, wanting to know, desiring contact...etc.
Web beacons are small electronic files that, e.g., Yahoo! uses to produce quantitative data about site use, including accessing certain cookies stored on the user's computer in order to provide "personalized" experience searching (meaning, in practice, serve up ads that are more likely to be clicked on and to produce revenue for Yahoo and its advertisers).
This file can be embedded anywhere on a page: in a banner ad, an image, etc. Yahoo! also embeds beacons in its html email messages so they know which emails were opened and which were not.
So beacons area way for them to provide data for themselves and their partners about how effective advertising is on their site. They help them make sales pitches to potential, new advertisers, retain old clients, and track their own business internally. Beacons help Yahoo! make more money from ad revenue, and drive ad revenue (from the other direction) by improving the "relevancy" of their search engine.
The goal of "personalization" that beacons serve runs into the issue of personhood that I wrote about yesterday: what kind of encounter is it to encounter a version of oneself given back via "personalized" features of a search engine, where those features are always advertisements that try to predict, based on your searches, what you might like to buy, what you might need, what you might aspire to own and wear and incorporate into your person. So in the technical definition of a web beacon, beacons are a technology that produces an encounter with oneself, where that encounter has a particular, split quality: 1. one encounters the results of one's search, which involves a complicated interaction with results that are often not the results one wanted, and that then demands successive retoolings in order to have the search results more accurately and helpfully mirror the desire one brought into the search; 2. and one encounters the advertisements served up as a result of one's search, which, on google, for instance, are the result of a real-time auction in which advertisers bid to be the one whose ad shows up in a search for any given word, and where the searcher, as a result, has to live with the funny mirror of the version of oneself that gets returned when one's search (desire, wish, curiosity, question) causes advertisements and the companies behind them to make educated guesses about who that person IS or WANTS TO BE based on the way that search term aggregates the searcher with other searchers who searched the same term and subsequently purchased a particular item. One finds oneself as a reflection assembled from bits of knowledge that line up, that mirror, only as well as the search term bids them to. And one finds oneself as a reflection of a statistical aggregate, a public whose coherence lies in the data that a company can collect about (what Battelle calls) intention, how the intention to find a certain piece of information correlates with the intention to buy certain products.
Note: the coherence of biopolitical populations is in the physiognomic and sociological traits that form the basis for ascribed identity AND in the goal of a biopolitical power to organize those populations in a particular way, allotting shares of the common (Ranciere), allotting state resources, marking boundaries and territorial lines in ways that benefit some and harm others (managing life). [check this: how does a biopoliticized population cohere? through what means? by what principles of unity?]
Ads on search engines manage life in a different way, with different goals, but no less intensely. Maybe "encounter" names some aspect of this other way of managing life, thus, a concept that is collaborative with "biopolitics," but not the same. Google et al manage life in the way advertising and marketing and capitalism in general have always tried to manage life [cf. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism], with this enormous shift: it does its work by attaching itself to the process of searching, wanting, finding out, desiring, seeking, being curious, being ignorant, wanting to know, desiring contact...etc.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Personhood and Search Engines
What do search engines know about us? http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2189531
Inside the question of what search engines know about you after you've used them is a question of subjecthood: what kind of person we are and become through our use of search engines. If google records a history of my searches, and uses these to serve certain ads up for me...or even just notices what I'm searching for right now and uses these to simultaneously serve up "relevant" ads, what kind of encounter does a search engine state with oneself or with personhood itself? Does it force people to consider who they are as an aggregate of what they look for online? Or what they go to the internet for? Of what they don't know? Of what they desire? Of what they fetishize? Of what they worry about? Of what they check obsessively? Of what they write about (e.g. uses google as a spellchecker)? Is looking at the ads in AdSense like looking at our own reflection, but as reflected by a mirror of capitalism, in this case, the part of capitalism that strives to make money off of how people search? The capitalization of search, curiosity, desire, unknowing itself?
[note: the kind of unknowing that proceeds and sometimes persists through and sometimes follows using a search engine makes interesting reference to Sedgwick's "privilege of unknowing." Here, the privilege seems to be not heteronormative, exactly, but somewhere in the vicinity of the advertisers who make money off the back of our searches].
Inside the question of what search engines know about you after you've used them is a question of subjecthood: what kind of person we are and become through our use of search engines. If google records a history of my searches, and uses these to serve certain ads up for me...or even just notices what I'm searching for right now and uses these to simultaneously serve up "relevant" ads, what kind of encounter does a search engine state with oneself or with personhood itself? Does it force people to consider who they are as an aggregate of what they look for online? Or what they go to the internet for? Of what they don't know? Of what they desire? Of what they fetishize? Of what they worry about? Of what they check obsessively? Of what they write about (e.g. uses google as a spellchecker)? Is looking at the ads in AdSense like looking at our own reflection, but as reflected by a mirror of capitalism, in this case, the part of capitalism that strives to make money off of how people search? The capitalization of search, curiosity, desire, unknowing itself?
[note: the kind of unknowing that proceeds and sometimes persists through and sometimes follows using a search engine makes interesting reference to Sedgwick's "privilege of unknowing." Here, the privilege seems to be not heteronormative, exactly, but somewhere in the vicinity of the advertisers who make money off the back of our searches].
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