… On reality TV, in general the terms of production are available, and there you see what’s happening, whereas [in the] online and social media context, there is a huge apparatus that’s collecting information, but it’s largely opaque and invisible. You don’t see it. You can see traces of it when you look for airplane tickets to go to Las Vegas, and then all of a sudden ads for hotels in Las Vegas are popping up on the websites that you visit. …
The opacity of the mechanism that tracks, sorts and mines all the data that you provide is very high. People just aren’t aware it’s going on. You can tell them so they know intellectually, but it’s just not there in the process when you’re online and doing things. It seems to fade into the background.
Google, there was a time when they would say that they’ve kept a record of every search that’s been entered in Google, and if you had that in the foreground of your brain every time you went to Google, it might impact some of the things that you typed into the window. But even if somebody told you that, after a while you’d kind of forget because it’s just not present in the environment.
Nobody goes on a reality TV show to make friends, but
people go on these social media sites thinking that they are doing one
thing, and they are in fact doing another.
… In some respect, what’s happening in the online digital environment
— it’s the platform for reality, for communication, for interaction —
has all become part of this information-gathering apparatus. So we start
to live in environments where maintaining certain types of social
connections — networking professionally, finding information that we
need for work or for leisure or for sociality — all of those
infrastructures become commercialized and take place on private
platforms in ways that are new and unique that didn’t exist before.Read more....
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