The information superhighway is lined with crowded shoulders of personal data.
The explosion of social networks, platform transferability, and avenues for self-publishing over the past decade has contributed to the creation of new, largely publicly-accessible streams of online information about you, your friends, your interests, and your activities. Add the dense caches of automated meta-data collected by your browsers, search engines, and advertisers, and even the smallest, previously isolated shards of activity are now strapped to your broader online presence.
Think back, for instance, to the first time you googled your name (we all did it). It was probably in the early 2000s, and the results were likely a passing mention on your high school’s alumni list, or perhaps a photo from a sporting event archived in a local newspaper site.
But now, even among those who (like me) consider themselves to have relatively restricted online profiles, the results can be quite startling. A search of my name, for instance, returns about 500 results, of which 250 actually relate to me. In 2001, these numbers were 10 and 2 respectively.
Discussions of perceived privacy are back in style, advanced most recently by an interactive digital media project titled ‘Take This Lollipop’ that has been accelerating though many social networks over the past several weeks. The enhanced video, created by AV producer Jason Zada and Canadian developer Jason Nickel, overlays screencaps from a viewer’s Facebook profile (which they must opt to grant the clip access to) onto a gritty and decidedly creepy scene of a skeezy stalker-type fetishizing and later targeting an online victim.
If you have not yet encountered it on one of your feeds/walls/lists, it comes highly recommended: http://www.takethislollipop.com. Obviously, no data is actually being saved, and Stan won’t visit your home after you watch it. The technique is also reminiscent of a somewhat brilliant GoogleMaps-enhanced music video for Arcade Fire’s ‘We Used to Wait’ single which made the rounds last year (http://thewildernessdowntown.com).
The TTL video, slickly shot and of convincing production quality, succeeds in provoking a real sense of irk and paranoia. The pull of the portal is remarkable, especially considering the implausibility of the scenario portrayed. The effect only works because users agree to share their info with the service in advance, wherein the vast majority of them would have at least semi-closed profiles which would block real-life creepshows from seeing anything beyond their name and a single profile picture. It is also interesting that a viewer’s first reaction is to send the link to everyone they know, encouraging others to share their personal data with what, for all intents and purposes, is an unknown source (though in this case, obviously, not a nefarious one).
It should also be noted that the tone of the project seems to be more passive than activist; meant as much to show off the creative skill of the production team as it is an avenue for insurrection. Think of a flick like Free Willy, which reminded audiences of the cruelty of wild animal domestication without expecting them to burn down a Sea World on the way home from the theatre.
And so, before we rehash our collective rage towards Facebook, Google, and any other elective service that subsidizes our online interactions, the pervasive reality must be stated: we want our personal information in cyberspace, and we wouldn’t give it up if given the chance.
Undoubtedly, much of our apprehension about sharing personal data stems from a mistrust of what corporations will do with it and, broadly, that fear is rational. But these concerns are not new, and certainly not limited to the internet. Ask a friend in the ad or direct marketing business how much personal information a company like Ford or Unilever would have collected about your mother and father decades before they bought their first computer. Shocking, frankly.
So why do we just seem to roll over in face of our data-wielding overlords? Consider the following.
You sit at your computer tomorrow morning. You turn it on; something’s off. You open a browser window to find that all of your carefully curated bookmarks are gone. Odd.
Your email is all funky, too. You log in to get all your incoming mail in its own little window, which vanishes forever into cyberspace after you read it. Luckily, you keep detailed notes on a pad of paper that you keep in a safe next to your desk.
You type a message, checking your contact list (a paper list, obviously, which you also keep in the safe) to find the correct address. You end up typing the email twice, as you accidentally closed the window at one point, and the concept of auto-saving drafts seems comically imprudent. Just think how brown the fan would be if Google got a hold of it!
You log into Facebook, now anonymous and quintuple-IP disguised, to find a list of accounts with usernames like X5Tgh6d99LRD, safely devoid of any images, opinions, or any other form of ungodly individual content.. If only the service allowed you to interact with others!
You look for some news to read over at nytimes.com, but all you find is a couple banner ads selling gold coins and local bus service in Beijing. The lack of targeted advertising, it seems, has driven the site out of business.
Frustrated, you gain access to your usual micro-blogging service, only to find that the text box does not have an associated “Publish” button. Whew; definitely dodged a bullet there! What kind of moron would ever want to express a personal opinion online? Don’t they realize that a company could use it for something sinister?!
I know, the specifics are childish. But the argument merits consideration.
The collection and leveraging of private data (and, largely, meta-data) is perhaps the single defining characteristic of what we consider to be an attractive, familiar internet. Most anything that our generation has done online, from platforms like ICQ, Friendster, Hotmail, Napster, MySpace, DC++, Gmail, Skype, Twitter, Evernote, YouTube, Facebook and Tumblr, to behaviours like reading, banking, booking travel, shopping, and recommending, has been not only facilitated but outright enabled by the ability of technologies to do so. And, deep down, consumers know it.
Perhaps the reason for Take This Lollipop’s success, then, is its ability to highlight this unsettling subtext of online experience, one in which our inclinations of mistrust and paranoia betray a reluctance to want it any other way.
