“There are official searchers, inquisitors…”
I really enjoyed Mary Flanagan’s [search] project this week. http://www.maryflanagan.com/search.htm
“Information technology has become an indispensable element in communication, play, and work. For example, a recent study shows that a typical office worker relies more on e-mail communication than face-to-face contact to share knowledge.(2) Almost every computer user relies upon Internet search engines to gather information, seek entertainment, and find pleasure. Search engines are deeply embedded into daily activity-they are the primary way people in the 21st century seek information …’we depend upon them so utterly.’ ”
I know for a fact that Search Engines are so highly dependent upon – I mean, that is my profession, to know what Search Engines Want… Search Engine Optimization if you will…
Keywords have become a new language. Billions of people search the internet a day, and what my job is is knowing what words they are searching for. A more interesting than useful tool, is finding out what people are searching for, http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html – each week. Interesting searches…
“[search] is an internet-based application which explores the human desire for information and knowledge through real-time monitoring of internet search engine inquiries from around the world…The work conceptually explores everyday life: how do people use technology in their daily lives? What are the commonalities of human desire? How is the desire affected by the internet’s inherent immediacy? What kinds of language do people bring to search engines? Does the kind of language used by searchers tell us something about how people view the internet and technology? Do people search for material or experiential items? How much time do people spend searching for sex, drugs, or money? Do people spend an equal amount of time searching for friends, god, and spirituality? Are our human values exposed through search engines? What is the data most sought after?…”
Playing around with [search] I clicked on words that most interested me: hockey, cards, imagination, spirit… and more and more phrases and/or website names came up, ads if you will for oxford shirts and golf balls… so odd how my words of hockey and imagination entangle with keywords such as oxford shirts…
Another work by Flanagan, [collection] “gathers up found material from various users’ hard drives and collects them on a centralized server. Going from computer to computer, [collection] scours drives and collects bits and pieces of user’s data – sentences from emails, graphics, web browser cached images, business letters, sound files-and creates a mobile mix of user experiences, operating system files, and normally hidden materials…”
Since its inception in 2002, I wonder if the internet privacy paranoia has made an affect on people using their experiment. I was apprehensive about downloading it because of the feeling of it being like someone rummaging through your garbage. In the end, I didn’t – I would have to switch to my PC in order to use it anyway – and I really don’t want anyone poking around my workstation…
See, that’s just it, we do see computers as “thinkers”. I was so taken aback by it rummaging through my cache files and e-mails, because I relate to a computer as a “thinker”. As I said in class, I do feel that technology has the advantage of being able to “think” one day – I am not talking programmed as in “scours drives and collects bits and pieces of user’s data – sentences from emails, graphics, web browser cached images, business letters, sound files-and creates a mobile mix of user experiences, operating system files, and normally hidden materials…” but once obtaining those pieces of data, knowing what they are…what to do with them, and potentially not knowing what to do with them.
In order to make a machine reach that next level, we have to give it that power. We already know quite a lot about making useful, specialized, “expert” systems, and are still learning how to make them able to improve themselves. When we learn how, then should we build machines that might be somehow better, smarter, stronger than ourselves?