I get a little bit excited when I have been
talking on the phone about a fantasy holiday to Nepal, and an STA “fly to
Nepal!” ad pops up on any page open on Google chrome. I am yet to decide whether such fervent attention on my every action is
terrifying or incredibly flattering. I tend to side with the latter and
conclude that Google, Facebook and YouTube all have a HUGE crush on me, as
everything I say they seem to eagerly match. What else are you meant to think,
when you gingerly open some Spanish study, and Facebook hurriedly invites you
to apply for a LOTE teacher scholarship? Then, when on my royal office chair I
deem one of their ads insufficient for my perusal, it is crushed, “why did you
hide it? Uninteresting? Misleading? “Sexually explicit? WHY WHY WHY? LOVE ME!
LOVE ME!”
This is what One Direction must feel like
around their fans. Eat your heart out Harry Styles, I have Mark Zuckerburg at
my feet, whose yearning for my approval grows upon every like button I hit, for
every ad that I destroy via the evil “x” button. The Internet is obsessed with
me, and any potential breach of privacy yadda yadda floats away when it seems
that my interests in “25 words or less” competitions, ASOS sales and novelty
exercise (aerial yoga anyone?) are the most fantastic in the universe.
Unfortunately this wave came to a crashing
close when I realised that Facebook and Google seem to have a crush on every
single person on the planet, with all of my friends having completely different
ads, and their “liked” pages providing them with a totally different internet
experience. So ads for Cleo subscriptions don’t show up on dude’s screen next
to me at the library wearing a cape and deeply entrenched in a GTA game? It was
all a lie. I thought you cared about me Facebook and Google. I thought my YouTube
searches of beluga whales spurring an onslaught of Cruise and Aquarium ads were
a sure thing that you were on my hook and you thought of nothing else but me.
Anyone with a computer and a profile on any
website, who has ever “liked” any page or merely thought about something they
liked while on said website will now be exposed almost exclusively these
interests and nothing else. In the short term, this makes your time on the Internet
much more personal and fulfilling. Facebook seems to suit me a lot more ever
since ads and videos about Rugby League floated away. The newsfeed is integral
to this phenomenon, as your preferences for what pages you like, and who you
want to hear from the most can make your Facebook experience a repetition of
the exact same thing every day. This is meant to be boring, but I still check
my newsfeed quite often, even though I know it will just be a jumble of
pejorative political cartoons, food porn and statuses from mates who I see
every day anyway. Nothing has changed, and according to the Internet the only
thing about me that will change in 20 years is my health insurance provider.
While I hear a lot about the death of
privacy, how it should be alarming that giant corporations are spying on their
consumers, I personally don’t care much that said giant corporation knows that
I don’t like Rugby League. Good on them. I am a whimsical 21-year-old whose
greatest use to them would be splashing out on a $500 coat thanks to my
post-adolescent underdeveloped frontal cortex and Gen Y-esque penchant for Internet
shopping while drunk. For me what is a concern, is the fact that I am no longer
forced to think about the world outside my own, the one that has been mimicked
for me in front of a screen via an algorithm. It goes even further than ads and
liked pages on the internet – personalised technology means I can quickly skip
past the business day section in the iPad version of the paper, instead of
having to turn the pages and incidentally read a word or two about the apparently
irrelevant economy. Foxtel IQ only records the TV shows I like, so I don’t have
to watch the end of the Arabian News to see Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (guilty!).
Without realising it, my list of interests has gotten smaller and smaller as I
become less exposed to other realms.
Should I reverse this effect and force
myself to read Business Day? Maybe I should have loud conversations about AFL
and carpentry, facing the screen so my scum arsehole cheating Facebook and YouTube
boyfriends can get the hint and teach me something new. Or I could just look
away from the screen and strike up a conversation with the man in the cape next
to me. Or not. Maybe I will just hit that Cleo subscription, and pretend to
feel enlightened and educated when I have read an article about endangered
tigers. Then after hitting up Instagram, I will feel drained from such
repetitive drivel and be compelled to delete the whole bloody thing, put my
foot through the screen and read a book outside. But I don’t. And neither will
you.
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