Lately I’ve been noticing just how hard it is to unwire ourselves from the mind of the machine. As the public and personal spheres merge before our eyes, it’s getting more and more challenging to erase the past or reinvent the present. The internet is the mother of all archives, leaving traces of everyone who’s ever been online, records of both our current identities and past versions of ourselves. This week Google released its 2009 Zeitgeist, collecting info from billions of online searches to see what we collectively looked for all year. Talk about an aggregate! That’s data from billions of computers, all linked to each other and to billions of humans. Google knows every question, every desire, and every product we've ever typed into that outlined little search bar, leading me to think the digital trail is proving mightier than the paper one.
A couple weeks ago Wired Magazine ran a story that was month in the making: Evan Ratliff covered his own attempt to fall into a digital black hole in order to remain unfound (and in the continental U.S.) for 30 days. If he succeeded, he’d get $5000. If someone found him, got his mug, and said the word “fluke,” they could win $5000, $3000 of which would be forked over from his own [salary] for chronicling the disappearance. The outcome? An expansive story told with impeccable pacing in which Ratliff moves back and forth between the details of his underground life and the efforts of the fanatical trackers on his tail. READ IT.
In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins begins his analysis of media convergence with a chapter on the popular reality television show Survivor. He examines the phenomenon of fans transforming themselves into private investigators to spoil the outcome of the show. The “spoilers” are a lot like Ratliff’s trackers; they set up websites, use social media networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, get their bearings with GoogleEarth, hack IP addresses, do some good old fashioned person-to-person investigating, and are freakishly successful at reaching their goals. Over the eight seasons of the show that Jenkins studied, some of the spoilers’ achievements included:
- pinpointing the exact location of the show and naming the sixteen contestants before any of this was announced
- figuring out the order of the “boots,” the people kicked of the island or mountain or rainforest or what have you
- knowing the final four competitors and the order of their exits
- knowing who wins before the end of the season
Jenkins attributes the formation of these “knowledge communities” to the knowledge culture that “has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down” and defines them as “voluntary, temporary and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments.” For the spoilers, this affiliation came about because it intensified the pleasure the fans felt in their quest for the ending in a chance-driven narrative that’s outcome was anyone’s guess. For the Ratliff’s (figurative) head hunters, the thrill of the hunt was augmented with the cash reward.
But after the season finale’s been shown and the month-long game of hide-and-seek is up, was it really worth all the time and effort? While noting that play for play's sake is of value, Jenkins suggests that those who invest in these cat-and-mouse hunts are also learning, through experimentation, skills that may help solve more critical problems in the future. Maybe the fans on the trail are ahead of their time, using tools as playthings because not enough of us know how to use them for them to be of value in the workplace. For me, simply following these charades from a distance has been thrilling enough. I’m not so interested in learning how to (“legally,” Ratliff’s trackers kept emphasizing) trace a stranger’s banking transactions, but more in understanding that it can be done. While we use online tools to track each other, the tools are also tracking us – accumulating a repository of data that can be used to market to, persuade and pursue us.
While Survivor’s contestants were under strict order by threat of fine not to divulge any details about their show, Ratliff intended to continue his online habits, writing Twitter updates under a pseudonym and monitoring his own hunt. In a way, he demonstrated a microcosmic portrait of the tenuous relationship between the personal and corporate spheres as they intermingle on the net. We all have access to more or less the same tools. Both individuals and companies (think professional trackers, hackers and spoilers) can hunt down data, pool knowledge, and use it to transform themselves, though the transformation most are shooting for is more likely promotion than disappearance.
If I were assigned the task of vanishing next week, could I do it? Probably not. There's just too much of me on the web, and I don't have the funds or the savy to go underground. I would need my own password-secured knowledge community just to guide me out of Austin! But maybe I should start picking up some new skills. Since the machine's already using me (and you, and eveyone), it's not a bad idea to test out some ways of subverting it.
According to this year's Zeitgeist, I'm not the only one trying to make the knowledge communities of social media networks work for me. Although Michael Jackson topped the list of fastest rising searches, he was followed by Facebook, Tuenti (a Spanish language social networking site), and Twitter, the same sites utilized by the trackers and spoilers to trail Ratliff and the Survivors.
Of his trackers, Evan Ratliff wrote, "they’d...proven my privacy to be a modern fiction. It turns out that people — ordinary people — really can gather an incredible dossier of facts about you." With more and more people harnessing the incredible power of emerging media tools, 2010 is shaping up to be another great year for watching each other play the games that may be the foundation of future business, political and educational interactions.
“The knowledge culture serves as the “invisible and intangible engine” for circulation and exchange of commodities,” Jenkins writes. Can't wait to see who's hot on its trail.
**Andy Goldsworthy photograph, "Lying down on dry earth while rain begins," found here.
