Daniel Soar discusses the way in which Google is like a ‘baby’s brain’, developing its relationship with me through its relationship with me; learning from my search habits and inferring information from my interactions with it (eg where I tend to keep my Android phone overnight is my ‘home’ address, in their database). Something similar – but different in terms of level of self disclosure – is true of Facebook, where the use of ‘liking’, is taken to mean that you are consenting to receiving advertising that directly responds to your preferences. Daniel Soar writes:
‘We are not Google’s customers,’ Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in The Googlisation of Everything. ‘We are its product. We – our fancies, fetishes, predilections and preferences – are what Google sells to advertisers.’
More exactly, they sell access to me – I have provided access to my own channel to them:
It isn’t possible, using Google’s tools, to target an ad to 32-year-old single heterosexual men living in London who work at Goldman Sachs and like skiing, especially at Courchevel. You can do exactly that using Facebook, but the options Google gives advertisers are, by comparison, limited: the closest it gets is to allow them to target display ads to people who may be interested in the category of ‘skiing and snowboarding’ – and advertisers were always able to do that anyway by buying space in ‘Ski & Snowboard’ magazine. The rest of the time, Google decides the placement of ads itself, using its proprietary algorithms to display them wherever it knows they will get the most clicks. The advertisers are left out of the loop.
Google learns more from my mistakes than I do – in the sense that if I search for some information and get an unhelpful answer, then search differently and find a more helpful answer; both Google and I benefit from this. Google, however, is learning from the mistakes of all of its users, and learning ‘systemically’. So, engineers have built into its algorithms the feedback loops which enable Google to ‘learn from our experience of relating to Google’. This feels like it has something ‘intimate’ in it to me – no matter how opaque the experience may feel as I am having it; adopting Daniel Stern’s language, it seems like a ‘virtual inter-subjective’ experience.
Slingshot