Despite the flood Among investigative presentations about data surveillance, users in the United States seem to be more drawn to those infrastructures than ever before, as if they are responding with a collective shrug —” I know, but it’s all the same.” It’s not just naive on the part of the user; it is more accurate to treat big data as something that we notice but we don’t really comment on. For the end user still registered — if offsite — a person is actually being profiled. This is not always a clear perception, although it can certainly happen as apps like TikTok highlight how good their algorithms are at delivering personalized content. for you. Essentially, though, personalization helps users feel “normal,” which means comfortable, integrated, and connected to the sense of social life. This often haunting feeling, so intense that it can sometimes happen, hardly resembles any particular emotion, because it feels like a gentle invitation to be yourself. “Feeling normal” helps explain why we identify with digital platforms even when we know they have the potential to harm us.
When describing media, normality is almost always taken as a negative, a feeling that mass audiences have lost their sense of individuality and given up their ability to judge. This concern has been around for a long time: “All submit to American tastes, they conform, they become homogeneous,” wrote a German publisher in 1926 about the impact of the electrical industry. American image to a German audience. In this sense, “normal” suggests a kind of discipline: People must conduct themselves according to predefined standards of behavior rather than validation. Indeed, libertarians mocking “normies” and “sheepule” sometimes use normalcy as a hack, as a way of insinuating one’s true intentions. Popular websites “Gray Man Theory” offer advice on what to wear to disappear from the crowd when planning a civil society break: “Natural and neutral colors suit unify; brown and gray. Nothing makes a memory like a t-shirt with a quote or pictures… Casual is the key word here.” (Of course, to pass as usual assumes some kind of privilege; some subjects – people with disabilities and people of color – have been marked, sometimes grossly, outside the norm.) Similarly, the web browser plug-in like TrackMeNot your search term by creating a cloud of more casual-looking search patterns collected from other users online — for example, “Live life to the fullest live without; have lost; make friends with yours; must repel; infants with jaundice without supplementation. “
Because “normal” explains how the individual fits into the broader public, it functions important in digital culture. In the earlier era of mass communication, television programs provided script and narrative of life, such as a host family or a nuclear family, which many viewers found to be pleasant. close to their own “normal” life. Though the era of three or four channels is long gone, we still long for that era to feel like reaching out to others — and thus the invitation to “feel normal,” despite the odds. This bland meaning, helps us navigate private and public online concurrency. It’s a confusing space, where we’re not sure how many other people are in the room with us, and where each picture looks like it could be in the millions — or no one at all.
Some sites try to resolve this confusion by conjuring up ghostly tracks of others nearby. For example, a travel site like Expedia will notify you that “10 other people are looking at this hotel,” although it is nearly impossible to guarantee that 10 other people are actually online and viewing the same thing at the same time. . . Of course, that announcement is a way of creating scarcity and artificial competition to motivate you to book a hotel, but it is also a compelling way to create a sense of co-existence, suggesting that you are connect with others.
For the most part, though, personalization tries to be more subtle. It tries to recognize and position you within the broader context of other people with similar interests to you so that you never feel out of place. For example, the data broker Mosaic product for digital advertisers has about 70 discreetly named market segments for each country in which it operates, such as M44 “Red, White and Bluegrass” and British S69 “Urban Survivors” or N59, “Asian Heritage,” act as representations of race, ethnicity, familial status, and income, and serve recreate the “neighborhood” in which each household lives. (At one point, when an airline data leak accidentally embedded a visitor’s Mosaic score into a hidden part of the site, I discovered I was in the G24 segment, “full of singles.” ambitious,” who in their description “brought a rolled up rubber mat to work, getting ready to head out at lunch for a yoga class.” Reader, I wish!) In German, literal translation of unheimlich (oddly) is “not at home.” By reversing, big data tries to simulate what it’s like to be at home: comfortable, among your people and things, even if this attempt frequently fails. And so the promise of personalization is that the web is all about you, no one else; that you are unique, not ordinary.
The real problem The goal of personalization is not to make you feel normal; There’s nothing wrong with the feeling of belonging online. It’s how personalization pushes us to pursue our “true” selves. Personalization only works if we become self-interested, identifying our feelings, likes and dislikes, preferences and relationships, so that the algorithm can give back to others and products. consumer products are consistent with those relationships. Authenticity — or, as a popular t-shirt says, “f*ck is the norm and be yourself” — is often a false sense of uniqueness generated by an algorithm.
