I’ve been working on Kracauer’s early writings, trying to think of his concepts of distraction and the loss of individuality attending the rise of modernity in terms of networked communication and video distribution. As a sort of residue of this work, I began thinking about internet use more generally, which spawned the following snippets, stripped of specific theoretical references.
Today’s spectator is still largely anonymous, but trackable,
not as easily able to disappear into a crowd. The internet user always
leaves a trace, whether through cookies or IP logs and referrals. The
user has become a string of numbers, coordinates indicating preferences
and likely paths, interests defined by interactions across sites. Often
nameless and faceless, the typical internet user still has an identity,
pieced together in code through browsing habits.
The loss of individuality is double-edged. Users of networks become bits of data as their habits are aggregated and used for predictive purposes, such as in gmail’s use of keywords in meails to generate ads, or netflix’s recommendation engine, which relires in part on other “Raters Like You” . The cult of self-expression prevalent in blogs and social networking sites seems to be a counterpoint to this anonymizing function of the web, but the ease with which one can hide such things as race and gender, and the rapidity with which one can delete an entire online existence suggest that identity online is still fleeting and superficial. I wonder to what extent this reflects offline, or face-to-face, realtime, interactions as well, or if these things can ever again be usefully or realistically separated.
