From Real Life Magazine:...I’ve come to view the internet as the greater mind that watches me, watches with me and for me.
Platform and search-engine designers have done everything in their power to foster this illusion through personalization. My search results are shaped by algorithms that take my search history into account, forming a picture of what I want to know. My social media accounts invite me to upload my friendships and document my face over time. My phone knows which city I’m in and shows everything in relation to the pulsing blue dot of me. I can find out a shocking amount from Google — so shocking that I forget to be amazed....
I’ve come to view the internet as the intelligence that watches me — and watches with me — until it suddenly doesn’t
I was walking down the street when it crossed my mind to wonder if my grandmother had ever had a nose job, and I thought, I’ll google it when I get home. A nanosecond later, I felt a flicker of fear.
To say that I thought I would google it is slightly disingenuous — it wasn’t a thought so much as a reflex, like reaching for something in the kitchen that’s usually kept in the same place. It’s the way people talk about the death of a loved one — picking up the phone to call them before realizing the outside world can be bare of something that lives with intensity in the mind. Coming up on a limit to the internet’s knowledge was an almost physical shock — the bottom fell out of my sense of narrative continuity, of being in a recorded universe. In that moment I realized I’d been thinking of the internet as an omniscient narrator.
On the Australian comedy Please Like Me, after the main character’s mother commits suicide, he tells his therapist, “I googled ‘why did mum kill herself?’ but it just told me why other mums killed themselves and now it keeps trying to sell me a new mum.” I came home and tried googling, “Did Grandma Judi get a nose job?” I got a Pinterest page of someone named Judy’s before and after photos, a Daily Mail article about how the demand for nose jobs in Iran is seven times higher than anywhere else, and an article about how to reduce snoring....MORE
