There
has been much discussion lately of the accumulation of personal data by
Internet companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google. But certainly the invasion
of people’s private lives started long before these companies existed. In the social sciences, people have been
doing surveys for a long time, asking people to fill out questionnaires, or
interviewing people on the telephone or face-to-face. And behavioral psychologists have done
experiments trying to acquire hard evidence with regard to how people would
respond to very specific defined focused circumstances. What these psychologists have been looking
for is scientific evidence in the manner of the hard sciences like physics,
chemistry and biology. Hard rules that
could give them an understanding that would allow people to be controlled and
manipulated in different situations.
These behavioral psychologists have total contempt for psychodynamic
psychologists who built models on more speculative intuitive theories that
couldn’t be tested in a more formal scientific way. For these behavioral psychologists, there
were no meaningful truths to be obtained from a more passive observation of
people as they freely discuss their feelings and thoughts and live their
lives. Such truths were too fuzzy for
them, and these truths were not useful for social engineering.
Even
before the Internet companies, private marketing companies have been doing all
kinds of different surveys to discover people’s preferences for different
products and services. There is one
company in the United States, Nielsen that attaches a machine to televisions in
private homes in order to determine what stations are being watched and at what
times. On the Internet, product
preferences based on Internet purchases lead to targeted advertisements being
sent to people.
In
the collection of data, we must not leave out the use of government techniques
for snooping on telephone calls, e-mails, texts and tweets for purposes of
national security. Sometimes, there is a
blending of private and public sources of data, as governments pressure private
companies to give up their data in the name of national security.
Increasingly,
there are more and more techniques being used for gathering data without
intruding into people’s lives, without making them a part of experiments, and
without formally asking them questions in surveys. So much information can be gleaned from
computer and smartphone usage. But
something happens to a person when he gradually is reduced to a bundle or to
bundles of data. Something happens not
only in terms of the way he is perceived by the people collecting the data, but
also in terms of the way the person perceives himself.
Collecting
data assumes that a person can be reduced to a series of clear cut facts. The whole point of these defined discrete
facts is to eliminate the ambiguity with regard to a person’s life, to perceive
a person in a defined job, in defined relationships with defined beliefs,
thoughts, hopes, expectations and feelings.
Collecting data converts aspects that are unformed or partly formed,
aspects that have fuzzy flowing blendable continual borders, into aspects that
are fully formed with defined discrete borders.
A person becomes a series of firm categories: he likes this, he believes
that, he wants to be this, he wants to buy that. He is fully alert, fully conscious, fully
congruous with a series of characteristics that are designated about him.
To
the extent that collectors of data act on the definitions that they create of
the people under investigation, they act on the knowledge that they gather in
order to control their subjects in different ways. Some collectors, in finding shopping
preferences, send advertisements for products that fall into the categories of
their subjects’ preferences in order to stimulate purchases. They want to increase sales by making
shopping as frictionless as possible.
Not only is the search for products and services minimized by having
them available for purchase on a computer or smartphone screen, but by
stimulating only partially formed desires through the promotion of products and
services similar to those pursued, the consumer doesn’t even have to go through
many mental machinations to formulate his desires for what he might want in the
future. The Internet companies do that
for him. The consumer becomes a
bottomless pit that is stuffed with products and services to purchase, much
like a goose is stuffed with feed in close quarters in order to make foie
gras. There is certainly a loss in the
narrative of the active pursuit of the right product or the right service for
the right purpose.
But
the accumulation of data allows an Internet company to think it knows a
consumer’s taste. And by being reduced
to these data, it becomes that much more difficult for a consumer to develop
new kinds of desires, new tastes based on personal transformation. It is as if a person can be boxed in by his
likes and dislikes.
In a way it could be said
that governments also use their accumulation of data on people in order to box
them in. Governments use their
collection of data to find people who might go against the policies that they,
the governments, espouse. Some of these
opponents are actually dangerous people that could do real harm to their societies. Others are peaceful citizens who simply are
considering alternative solutions to the problems that the governments are
trying to deal with. Governments that
are not democratic frequently perceive the people in the second category to be
as threatening to their power as the people in the first category. Data are used to keep all opponents in line,
even people who are simply expressing doubt as to the efficacy of government
policies without any really strong adversarial solutions. Collections of data create strong definition
in various aspects of individuals, when often such definition doesn’t really
exist in real life.
It is not only that
people are boxed in by the uses of data by public and private entities and
prevented from easily growing, evolving and transforming in different
ways. By becoming overly defined, by
becoming a list of traits and characteristics, a list of desires and beliefs
and thoughts and expectations, etc., people become fragmented or, using today’s
language, pixilated. They lose a sense
of the coherence of an organic sense of self, a core of who they are at the
center of everything. They become
defined discrete data, defined discrete stimuli, bundles of little mental
fragments, and lose their connection to the flowing blendable, continual
feelings, emotions, ideas and intuitions that bind them together as whole
people.
Today, with our strongly scientific orientation towards
knowledge, which correlates with our strong focus on technological innovation,
we increasingly see our knowledge of people and things as based only on hard
evidence, only on discrete pinpoints of knowledge, only on facts, only on
data. Fuzzy intuitions based on more
passive observation, on soft empiricism, just are not taken seriously. Social sciences like behavioral psychology,
sociology and economics try to imitate the hard sciences by developing
experiments and statistical studies and try to generate data based on hard
numbers. All this data supposedly helps
us to understand and manipulate people in the aggregate, so they can be
properly slotted, kept relatively happy and kept relatively trouble-free, so
that life in society as a whole can be kept relatively frictionless, free of
significant social turmoil and disruption.
But ultimately, it means treating people as if they were
simply social machines, simply robots.
As people see themselves mirrored in the endless streams of data
generated by university research groups, by private companies and by government
agencies, they experience themselves as bundles of data, as bundles of
free-floating figures in a vacuum. And
with fractured pixilated senses of self, they are subject to the kind of
manipulation that occurs with machines and robots. Is this really the kind of life that we
humans want to live?
© 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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