Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
households, has come under scrutiny for allowing such records to fall into the
hands of convicted sex offenders. In the case of Metromail, one randomly se-
lected individual was represented by over 900 pieces of data including address,
income, ailments, marital status, hobbies, etc., as well as detailed purchasing
habits (Bernstein 1994).
Such examples reveal that within the contemporary electronic landscape,
each interaction concatenates to the regime of a virtual data-body, constructed
and existing in virtual space. These virtual identities are constantly updated
with information about credit ratings, spending habits, video preferences,
ATM usage, medical history, driving records and numerous other bits of in-
formation. Artist Jeffrey Schulz calls this data space the “identity economy”
and notes that “...every telephone call, every withdrawal of money from a bank
account, every mail order, every magazine subscription, every visit to a doctor,
etc., - creates a potential surplus of demographic identity information” (Schulz
1993: 160).
The internet, particularly the World Wide Web, provides an example of the
relationship between utopian navigation and data collection. Network tech-
nology enables marketers to monitor a user's activities within a site, as well as
terms entered in data-retrieval engines. Detailed web site “registration” pro-
cesses allow sites to associate browsing behavior with personal information,
thus making the information collected even more valuable to advertisers. The
idea of uniquely identifying a user has even been pushed into the computing in-
frastructure itself. Both Intel and Microsoft have had to manage the corporate
relations snafu arising from the revelation that Intel's Pentium III micropro-
cessor, and Microsoft's operating system Windows 98 both broadcast a unique
machine identifier when connecting to the network (Clausing 1999; Markoff
1999). While ostensibly put in there for “debugging” purposes, such an identi-
fier certainly makes the task of automated demographic data collection easier.
The contemporary landscape is inhabited by many mechanisms to extract
data from our pleasures and desires as well as presumably fears and dislikes.
As advertisers begin to better utilize non-exclusionary marketing approaches
based upon appropriated pluralist discourse and electronic, networked inter-
faces designed to process more sophisticated blocks of data, our culture ap-
proaches an interesting threshold. Here every action is an interface. Here every
passing whim or building need may be immediately analyzed for the perfect
commodified remedy, suggested by ubiquitous marketers perfectly in accord
with our financial assets. At this threshold, all of our subjective interests serve
to forcibly fix our position within a marketing database.
Te rmi na l Time
ex-
plores this convergence of utopian navigation with demographic data collec-
