Have New Technologies Helped Us Learn More About Ourselves?

As I was walking to the bus stop today I began thinking about all the ways recent technologies have impacted my peripheral knowledge. Simply by making media digital we now have access to a huge amount of information. I remember when I got my first iPod 6 years ago. I was blown away by the fact that I no longer needed to carry CDs around with me. Now in one device I could carry around my entire music collection. This new technology brought stress as I no longer only had 10 albums to pick from but instead could pick from thousands. Today this is no longer a problem because I have found ways to adapt to what these new technologies have made available.

In the above paragraph I used the term ‘peripheral knowledge’ and I must explain what I mean. 15 years ago, before music went completely digital I had a rack of CDs that would sit in my room next to my stereo. These albums did not do anything unless I applied some sort of force to them (i.e. picked one up, took out the CD and placed it in the CD player). Today all of our albums are now on our computer and are constantly interacting with each other and telling me about my listening habits. For example I can create a list in iTunes that consists of songs I have listened to 7 times. Never before was this possible unless you kept a post-it note on your CDs and checked it each time you listened to an album. iTunes can also tell me if there are songs I have not yet listened to. iTunes can also tell me when the last time I listened to an album was by telling me the exact date and time I last listened to it.

Now you might be wondering who cares but there is a lot of significance in being about to track this information. If we were to move our iTunes account onto a cloud network and let our accounts interact with other people’s accounts we could ultimately use that information to find people who have similar listening styles. We could also use that information to find music we may never have listened to before. As technology progresses this information will become more and more precise.

Netflix already uses this technology to help me find movies they think I would want to watch. By tracking my movie watching practices Netflix can match me up with the practices of other users and make suggestions based on these results and often times it is very accurate.

If you think about this another way we already do this with the social groups we interact with. How many of us have ever looked someone up on Facebook after meeting them for the first time? Our Facebook profiles are huge resources of information just waiting to be accessed. The amount of surveillance possible on Facebook is incredible. If I am invited to a party through an invite on Facebook I can determine if I want to attend based on whom else will be there. If there is someone on the list I do not know I can look at there profile and figure out what they are into and consider, before even meeting them, if they are someone I would want to talk to. Considering if this is productive social behavior will need to wait for another post.

As more of our actions are being cataloged in these arbitrary databases the more we can learn about our actions and ourselves. We can keep track of what we have done and when we did it unlike ever in history before now. The question we must now ask ourselves is how we will use this information.