Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
In December 2009, Google announced that search would thereafter be personalized
according to fifty-seven signals, among them location, machine and browser informa-
tion, and prior search history.
28
The company soon assured its users that it was “recog-
nizing your browser, not you,” but who or what is meant by “you” in this formulation?
In one account, the “you” is our “data double.” Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson
explain:
Surveillance technologies do not monitor people
qua
individuals, but instead operate
through processes of disassembling and reassembling. People are broken down into a
series of discrete informational l ows which are stabilized and captured according to
pre-established classii catory criteria. They are then transported to centralized locations
to be reassembled and combined in ways that serve institutional agendas. Cumulatively,
such information constitutes our “data double,” our virtual/informational proi les that
circulate in various computers and contexts of practical application.
29
Financial, travel, and governmental databases might be coordinated but our “data
doubles” are only temporarily aggregated, our user profiles produced as an effect or
consequence of search queries rather than preexisting stable entities that are then
subject to search. It is at this point then that the interpellation argument falters because
the processes of subjectification at the heart of the “panoptic sort” have been trans-
formed. Along the same lines, Matthew Fuller argues that surveillance is no longer
about visual apprehension but is instead a “socio-algorithmic process” that captures and
calculates “flecks of identity,” the data trails of our everyday actions, such as our brows-
ing history, financial transactions, and our movements as they are recorded by GPS
coordinates on our mobile devices and RFID tags in passports and identity cards.
30
The
“flecks” concept emerges in some respect from Gilles Deleuze's outline of the emer-
gence of the “dividual” in the context of the control society; if the individuated self was
both product and figure of modernity, “dividuals” are rather fragmented and dispersed
data bodies. They are, as Tiziana Terranova explains, “what results from the decomposi-
tion of individuals into data clouds subject to automated integration and disintegra-
tion. ”
31
Put another way, they are the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) of the data
market, in which bits and pieces of a supposed composite profile, which is itself an
operative fiction, are sliced and diced into different tranches, such that a stable refer-
ential link to a singular entity becomes lost in a sea of user intent data. The now-
orthodox market position is that the value of data does not depend on its connection
