I had to look myself up after reading this. Amazing! I am widely known to some databases. Big deal.
"her innermost thoughts, represented by her search terms"...really?
And we care about this....Why? There's 5 minutes I'll never get back.....
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As always "Art" is a subjective matter. This "Art" fits squarely into the New Media category. Separate from traditional tangible media, but no less noteworthy and no less influential.
Sorry, 90% of engagement with tech is McDonald's - mostly bland, boring, banal, and probably not terribly good for you. Better to free your mind from such "awesomeness".
Thank goodness this could not be done when I was 23 years old, because now in mid-life it would be very hard to find professional employment.
Seems to me that our culture is turning into a population of narcissists.... really, in the end, who cares about the day to day details of what some one else searched for on the internet. Art??? Really???
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I don't necessarily "care," but I often find things like this interesting. And when i don't I choose to ignore them ... just as you can do. So it has always been and so it will always be: people choose to share what they want to share and others choose whether or not they want to pay attention. Just because we have more media for doing so doesn't change basic human nature.
The question is about when Google and other social media companies will start openly sell your profile :-) Nowadays, companies do background check, so imagine if they start for the sake of "safety", "civil rights abuse", "anti-terrorism" or any other agenda request your internet profile check :-)
Why did you search for "Snooki diet" five years ago?!
I would love that time!
Why did you search for "Snooki diet" five years ago?!
I would love that time!
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Sheesh my own 'personal search history' is irremediably confounded with that of my 14 yr old son and 10 yr old daughter who use machines that google associates with me. I am sure that advertisers are paying tippety top dollar for access to that aggregate personality and reaching none of the 3 of us.
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If you want to keep your "dark data" private, I highly recommend that you use duckduckgo.com instead of google for all your online searches.
https://duckduckgo.com/
https://duckduckgo.com/
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I use DuckDuckGo and Anonymouse whenever I'm searching anything not for work. At work, I completely clear history, etc every night. Paranoid? Sure. But I prefer a level of privacy.
Use the Disconnect search app instead of Google on an Android phone too.
This is indeed an interesting experiment, but it also raises the inevitable question of what Sartre would have called "bad faith". I believe Beckles when she says that she only deletes the queries with typos, but it's still impossible for her self-awareness not to somehow affect what she _does_ search for.
That doesn't necessarily invalidate the artistic value of what she's doing, but her work is definitely based on the assertion that it's somehow "authentic" on a level that's just not really possible.
That doesn't necessarily invalidate the artistic value of what she's doing, but her work is definitely based on the assertion that it's somehow "authentic" on a level that's just not really possible.
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