Until recently I didn't quite realise what a big role a certain search engine company has played in my life. I remember when it first started it was a rebellious answer to another established computer company that had, for a long time, sold their own software as a neccesary part of the computer. They were dominant on the market.
The new search engine was supposed to be cool with a weird name and you could also have email and lots of gigabite storage for free. It seemed like a better option than hotmail so you moved over and soon everyone did. Then they started slowly sending out all kinds of products. Like a free image editor with lots of online storage for photos. And a map. And later a full blown visual map of almost every house, in every city, in every corner of the world. Now they also have a tv channel. And zoom like software, and a contact storage with calendar planning, reminders and all sorts of other things that I seem to use every day.
By detecting my behaviour and desisions this search engine company must have gained deep insight into so many things that I have done and thougth about through out the years. the people I have met and all the places I have been at. It´s like turbo psycholgyst on mental steroids who has observed you for years.
Let´s visualise apps as objects
I sometimes visualise a person, like a touristy type, standing somewere totally surrounded with all the stuff you find on your smartphone. Let's start
A record player
A radio
A camera
A few clocks
A calendar
A phone book
Some letter paper and lots of envelopes
Bank books and credit cards
Some pinball games
A remote control
A tracing device
A synthesiser with lots, lots of instrumental sounds
A dj deck
A visual board
A note book
A video camera
Sound editing device
A calculator
A compass
Parking meters
Airplane tickets
Facial recocnition device
Live video broadcasting device
A guitar tuner
A scale
A step counter
Lots of books
Some security cameras
Lots of videotapes
An enourmous collection of photoalbums
Morse coding device
and the list goes on
The cultural growth, that has been going on in cyberspace since the search engine company with the cool name and it's older sibling, the Fruit, finally took over, has been too overwhelming to describe.
What we have now is a very big non objective reality (or maybe singulary objective reality since it's all in one device), that affects and/or controls our behaviour to a small or a large degree.
It gives you something to think about.
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