MA Thesis
New Media and Digital Cultures
University of Amsterdam
27 June 2014
Google Now!
A metaphysical analysis of the accelerated flows, rhythms, desires and
modulations that operate the commodified databases of Google Now.
Author:
Wannes Sanderse
Email:
wannessanderse@gmail.com
Student Number:
10095446
Thesis Supervisor:
Michael Dieter
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Table of Content
Introduction Page 1
Chapter 1. Manage Your Day.
Managing Time by Managing Modulations Page 3
Chapter 2. Stay Connected.
Desire through Control, the Convenience of Marketing. Page 12
Chapter 3. Be a Local.
Quantifying Locality as Commodified Desire. Page 21
Chapter 4. Pharmakon.
The Pharmacology of Google: Accelerate, Disconnect, Regulate. Page 27
Conclusion Page 35
1
Introduction.
One of the first videos released about Google Glass showed how Project Glass would function ideally (Google, project glass one day...).1 This video was a first look at Google’s plans for Glass, and provides an interesting first person perspective into Google’s ideal future. Opening with a happy and catchy ukulele tune, which features heavily throughout the video, the first shot reveals a view of the Glass users home as the user is yawning and stretching on the couch. In front of him on the coffee table several devices are displayed: remote controls on top of a magazine, a smartphone, a brandless aluminium laptop and in the background there is a flat screen TV and a home theatre set. All these media devices are typically associated with the home and they are all media that are not inherently ‘wearable.’ First,the user puts on his Google Glass and it powers up displaying the familiar Google colours and design. During this elaborate showing of his morning ritual the user is reminded of friends he needs to meet, schedules appointments and gets automated weather updates when looking out the window. Google establishes comprehension of both old familiar devices and enhances the new capacities of this device. Google aims to harness a desire for their new technology by showing how it solves these problems connected to logistics, their technology works through timing and spacing and provides expedient information at "just the right time". Glass acts like a personal assistant that fits into the ritualistic flow of your morning, helping you schedule what your day will look like, yet by
reminding the user it phenomenologically interrupts his natural habitual flow. The underlying promise of this video lies in the notion that allowing software to plan your day will free up time for the things you like to do in your leisure time. The software that operates this new device and provides the reminders, pop-ups and tips is called Google Now and has already been pre-installed and is
operational on all android devices that run on Android Jelly bean 4.1 and later. It was launched on the 9th of July 2012 and was made available on IOS on the 29th of April 2013. It is this piece of software that I will use as a case study to analyze how Google uses their vast collection of data to predict what information the user might need at what time. Google has subdivided their Now cards into three categories: manage your day, stay connected and be a local (Google Now)2. I will use the same division to analyze the different ways that the accumulated data of Google that is behind Now's sleek design influences the temporalities, localities and modulations and the underlying flows mechanisms of diagrammatic control that make up late capitalism. The first chapter will deal with the managing of time, I will start by showing the different temporalities that the labourer experienced in his shift from the factory floor to his post-modern immaterial and modular condition. An important notion that connects this software that helps plan leisure time with the temporalities of the labourer is the
1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4
2 disappearance of the distinction of the separation between leisure and work time. My analysis starts with the emergence of clock-time as the dominating temporality and caries on with the concepts of real time and network time to show how temporalities have changed from Fordism to its current condition of the commodified time through modulation. In the second chapter I will deal with the control mechanism that allow for this commodification of time, the concept of the data double. I will show how these devices are sold through the promise of convenience, which promises timesaving so you have more leisure time to enjoy or make you more productive. In the process of saving you this time Google use the data you are feeding them through the device to market products to you, it creates a feedback loop between you and Google where you get more time but this time is spent consuming. In the third chapter I will discuss how this flow, this marketing feedback loop, is taken from the virtual to the real by way of localisation. Your location data is captured and made quantifiable, by knowing where you are Google sends targeted adds that are specific to your location, as you can see in the video. When the user is done with his morning ritual he quickly grabs his bag and keys as the music swells again, he walks down the stairs and onto the streets of New York with a brisk pace. As he walks past the subway, a green icon with the number six and an exclamation mark pops up displaying the message: “Subway service suspended.” Underneath two icons are displayed, a walking person and a train. The user exclaims: “Oh man, really?” He selects the walking route and a map to his destination; the Strand bookstore is shown in his field of vision. As he continues to walk and pet a dog, the directions in the right hand corner keep informing him where to go. The user stops in front of a poster displaying a ukulele playing musician. He says: “Oh sweet, remind me to buy tickets to Monsieur Gayno tonight” in the right hand corner a microphone is displayed and the text displays: “Monsieur Gayno Live ticket sale.” In the video the user decides to consume after seeing a traditional add in the street and order Google to remind him, in the latest Now update Google will send adds based on your location and search queries that remind you of things you might want to buy. Google transposes the digital targeted ads based on your personalized search results onto the real world and integrates this with the flow of traversing urban space by reminding you what you wanted to buy when you are near a store that sells this. In my last chapter I will critically discuss three possible remedies to the ailments of human technology relations that I have described in the previous chapters. I will discuss the
possible solutions that accelerationism, disconnection and regulation pose to the presented problems of the first three chapters and pharmologically analyze them to see if they can remedy the potential poisonous quality of Google Now.
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Chapter 1. Manage Your Day. Managing Time by Managing Modulations
"Just the right information at just the right time" Google Now 2013
The category of Google Now cards that deals with management of the user’s day contains categories that reveal the weather forecast for your home location, your destination and your work location, that provide updates for when you should leave to catch your plane and that update your Google maps with the most efficient routes to drive, cycle or walk based on current traffic. All these cards are friendly reminders of how to live your life more efficiently; if you leave at the right time you will remain dry, evade traffic jams and catch your flight. All these ‘just in time’ services are defined by algorithms that are fed with search queries, location data, calendar information, emails and so on. The user is modular, their location, occupation, motives and desires vary in potentially infinite ways. The user is the
labourer in post-modernity; their work time is modular, but so is their leisure time and a clear distinction fades between the two. Time is a modulation: “like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (Deleuze 318). To manage a state of constant flux, to survive the forms of free-floating control, the user needs to manage their time carefully. Google Now claims to provide the means to manage the day, to manage the modulation of time. In this chapter, I will explore the sociology of time, how the experience of time has influenced the labourer in the transition from the factory to the current modular condition. I will start with a reflection on clock time and Fordism, work my way through real time, timeless time and network time. In doing so, I will provide a critical genealogy of time in relation to temporality, technology and commodities. As an amalgamation of these three, the emergence of clock-time is a crucial historical development in this lineage.
The emergence of the mechanical clock allowed for one of the first modern regulations of temporality with significant implications for the experience of time. It allowed for the natural rhythms of the day and night cycle to be divided in timeslots of 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds. In its first use, it allowed Christian monks to keep to a strict schedule of prayer. When the bell rang the monks knew it was time for prayer; their temporality was changed from the natural rhythm of morning, midday and evening prayer to the rigorous timetable of seven hours of daily prayer. The mechanical clock spread to the urban sphere around the fourteenth century where it ordered and structured the lives of its citizens and allowed for the temporality of experienced clock-time. It did so by establishing an important connection between the human and machine, as Eric Kluitenberg explains,
With the spread of the mechanical clock from the monastery to the cities, and its subsequent miniaturisation and massification, worldly and spiritual life in Europe were integrated in a uniform time regime. For centuries to come the clock would become the ultimate connection machine,
4 organising and binding the lives of millions into an integrated social, economic, and religious system.
(Kluitenberg, 159) The new system of temporal regulation enabled by the clock, moreover, had significant consequences for the organization of labour.
In Empires of Speed, Robert Hassan provides an expansive sociological analysis of time beginning with an analysis of clock time, particularly how this highly influential piece of technology has altered our experienced temporalities. He does so by describing the difference between clock time and real time. Clock time very much resides in the age of modernity, and the age of the factory with its predictable and efficient rhythms. This efficiency was honed through Fordism where every product or service was designed to be mass-produced and was, therefore, standardized so that more products could be made for less cost (Hassan, 20). These are the basics of efficiency in a modern economic context. The standardized mode of production had a specific temporality governed by the clock. It is the clock that provided us with the knowledge that we were accelerating: we could tell how many hours, minutes and seconds an action or production process took and tried to decrease this as much as possible so that more could be produced in a shorter period of time. It is this search for efficiency that led to our modern accelerated lives. Clock time, however, allowed for some clear distinctions to be made about separating work time from leisure time: when you punched out, work time ended and leisure time began. It was the regularity that the mechanical clock brought that laid the foundation of modern capitalism, “the regularity of the division of the day into even time segments in the
Benedictine monasteries, punctuated by the call to collective prayer prefigured in many ways the organisation of collective labour in the Ford factories. The ticking of the mechanical clock might thus almost be likened to the humming of the modern production line” (Kluitenberg 2).
It was the workday that kept the labourers occupied at the production line. Indeed, in Capital,
Volume 1 chapter 10, Marx asks the key question: what is the working day? He starts with the notion
that labour power is bought and sold at its value, like all other commodities, it is determined by the working time necessary to produce it.
"We started with the supposition that labour-power is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If the production of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours, he must work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value received as the result of its sale. The necessary part of his working day amounts to 6 hours, and is, therefore, caeteris paribus [other things being equal], a given quantity. But with this, the extent of the working day itself is not yet given."
(Marx, 159) The worker, however, can exceed the hours it takes to produce a product and thus creates surplus labour value. The labourer in an artisanal mode of operation mayknow how much time is spent to create surplus value, thus how much profit is accumulated from the expended labour. In capitalist
5 production, however, it is the capitalist that buys labour time from the worker at its daily rate (Marx 160). The maximum length of the working day is constrained by two different forces; firstly, the material constraints of the working day as the amount of labour an individual can exert. This is often understood as the opposite of the time required to satisfy physical needs, or the time it takes for meals, sleep and the preparation for work. The other force that limits the day is the moral constraint, the worker needs to fulfil social and intellectual desires, both conditioned by their general state of social advancement. The working day thus varies from worker to worker depending on their employer, their own needs and physical limits (Marx, 159). The capitalist has a different perspective on the working day, they seek to consume the largest amount of surplus labour that can be derived from labour:
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.
(Marx 160) The capitalist tries to acquire as much surplus labour from workers at the lowest price. The surplus labour produced by the workers is, therefore, the commodity they sell, and the capitalist tries to buy it as cheap as possible. The capitalist tries to pay for one working day, while you produce for two, until the worker has had enough and protests this equation and demands the value of the commodity being sold. For Marx, this results in political struggle:
The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour,
i.e., the working-class.
(Marx 161) This struggle between capital and workers was the condition of labour prior to Fordism. Workers were confronted with a different temporality in this context; besides the horrible conditions of the factory, child labour and the low wages, the conflict over working hours was based on resisting its excessive expansion. Fordism, in this respect, can be understood as equally a historical compromise between capital and labour to end violent struggle, strikes, sabotage and repression, as it was a way to open new markets:
The Fordist factory--typified by the huge auto plants which come to form the hub of the advanced economies--spatially concentrates huge bodies of dequalified labour subjected to the brutality of continuous automated machine pacing. In doing so, it creates the conditions for an unprecedented form of class solidarity. With craft skills increasingly eroded by Taylorism, the mass worker fights
6 not to uphold the dignity of a trade, but to make capital pay for lives vanishing meaninglessly down the assembly line. No longer able to control production, he can still stop it. The vulnerability of the assembly line to interruption and sabotage, and the cost to management of idling the
increasingly expensive accumulation of fixed capital provide the points of attack. In a cycle of struggle that finds its paradigmatic North American moments in the 1937 Flint sit-down strikes, the mass worker finds increasingly effective ways of converting the mechanised factory into a bastion of resistance.
(Dyer-Witheford 73) With Fordism and Taylorism, the work hours of labourers became shorter through more efficient production processes tied to industrialisation. Labourers were paid more and had the time to spend and consume. Henry Ford saw that if he could efficiently produce the Model T and pay a workforce enough that they could afford it, the market would grow and thus gave birth to the accelerated consumerism of modernity. The Nine to Five workday was born, as well as the Monday to Friday working week, leaving plenty of time to consume the standardized products and services that rolled off the assembly line (Dassbach, 78). This industrialized workflow came with its own rhythms and tempo. No longer would an artisanal labourer spend hours crafting a single product and deriving satisfaction from finishing what was created, since the new labourer was only a cog in the whole apparatus, and only constructed a small piece of the end product. Instead, production was derived from the mechanic processes that surrounded the Fordist labourer and led to an increase in efficiency (Crary, 57). With this accelerated rate of production came a likewise accelerated rate of consumption. It is this process of acceleration that becomes a key feature of modern capitalism.
With the tendency toward acceleration in modernity, however, new contradictions and conflicts are introduced into the working week. For instance, as emerging socio-technical pressures reduce the available time to produce and consume new products, a new temporality was needed to leverage more time to consume, and more time to produce. These tensions can be effectively explained through Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s analysis of formal and real subsumption (Hardt and Negri, 223). In their account, the labourer produces surplus value which the capitalist extracts; this process of subordination to capital is called formal subsumption. The capitalist’s desire to innovate and accelerate this process is, moreover, central to this condition. More subsumed labour leads to more capital, but when all labourers are subsumed, the capitalist needs to innovate in other areas. Capital requires increasing the efficiency of workflow through Taylorization, and opening new markets to expand its territory through Fordism. The capitalist needs to increase efficiency through more innovative technology and chase down an increase in productivity (Ibid. 223). In doing so,
productivity is increased not only in all that has already been subsumed, but also in spaces that were previously outside of its purview. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari influentially theorize in
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, capital both deterritorializes and reterritorialises (271). What
was previously on the outside of capital will be made inside. The worker opens up new spaces through ingenuity and creativity to deterritorialise immaterial and material space, capital then “axiomizes the
7 decoded flows and reterritorialises the deterritorialised flow” (271) through the processes of
commodification. The capitalist aims to situate these new dynamics where productivity resides within a new field of exploitation to extract wealth. Reterritorialisation of space is theoretically without boundaries according to Hardt and Negri, this means that capital can territorialize both immaterial and material objects (227). This move into immateriality is central to real subsumption; a new domain of information and communication for capital to reterritorialize, re-order and restructure as productive forces to extract its surplus value. In the new economy, this labour is based on services, not on the production of products:
The service sectors of the economy present a richer model of productive communication. Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges. Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor – that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.
(Hardt and Negri, 290) The worker no longer aims to produce an object; they are no longer bound to the specific temporality of the production time it takes to produce an object. Work no longer needs to happen in the confined space of the factory, it penetrates all aspects of life. You can be productive at a desk in the office, at home, in a café or in transit, anywhere it is possible to come up with creative ideas that can be
subsumed by capital. It is because of these transformations that the distinction between work time and leisure time has become vague.
Along with these new kinds of immaterial labour come new temporalities of combined work and leisure time. With real subsumption, the majority of the labour that was once performed by workers in unison with technology has now been replaced by increased automation. It is from this expansion of technical agencies that a new temporality was born, real-time, which comes with a new set of politics. A lot of our perception today is mediated through technology, as Paul Virilio notes, “in the past, if you wanted to know what temperature it was, you looked out the window and saw if it was nice out or not. Today, you turn on the television to get the news and the weather” (67). This
mediation of space leads to a change in temporality, because most of what we see is no longer within our reach. Visible remoteness, therefore, proves to be problematic:
How can we rationally manage the split, not only between virtual and actual realities but, more to the point, between the apparent horizon and the transparent horizon of a screen that suddenly opens up a kind of temporal window for us to interact elsewhere, often a long way away?
(Virilio 37) This new way of interacting with the world over a distance is what Virilio calls the ‘teleobjective,’ where television and multimedia are collapsing the horizon of time and space. This compression of space, exemplified by the screen that shows us the other side of the world, alters our conception of
8 time. Our mental map of the world shrinks each time transportation technology takes a leap forward; for instance, with the introduction of intercontinental flights from Europe to the United States, thus the distance between the two collapses (Virilio 42). Yet with the new communication technology, it is possible to interact with the world that is far away in real space, yet close in real time. When you make a video call with someone on the other side of the world, you open a window to that space, your mental map shrinks so much it almost disappears, because in fact there is no distance. It is in this realm of no-space where real time resides. It relates to the notion that events happen in one’s immediate perception unrelated to relations of space. Real time allows for “meeting at a distance, in other words, being telepresent, here and elsewhere, at the same time” (Virilio 10). When we watch a World Cup football match in the Netherlands, it is five hours earlier in Brazil, when it is 9 o’clock pm in the Netherlands and the sun is starting to go down, we see through our screen and it is still very sunny in Brazil. Nevertheless, we know that we share that same moment of ‘Now,’ when a goal is scored regardless of the position of the sun, regardless of distance. The problem of real time that Virilio articulates is the disappearance of the present. Real time is the opposite of real presence because ‘the Here’ is removed from the equation. The Here is no longer important and gives ground to the rule of Now:
Teletechnologies of real time are doing: they are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our 'concrete presence' in the world.
(Virilio10) The danger this poses is a loss of history and geography. Human beings live in three dimensions of chronological time; the past, the present and the future. With the domination of real time, a
presentification occurs and we run the risk of losing our past and being amputated from the future (81).
The term real time does not convey its meaning adequately enough; indeed, analyses network-time might open up more room for discussion. With the arrival of computers and the ability to connect them in a network, a new temporality was born. The previous networks, of course, had a deep impact on the experience of time: with new telecommunication networks, you could connect over a distance in increasingly expansive and synchronous ways. But within the network lies a different temporality, real time does not suffice because even though it describes the consciousness of interacting with a global temporality, it negates the actual temporality of the network that makes this possible. Nothing expresses temporality in such an instantaneous fashion as the internet with its time-stamped automated software. One example can be noted in the 23.49 Whatsapp notification where search queries are expressed by the quantity of results, along with the fractions of a second it took to retrieve them. Our relationship with clock time and real time is, therefore, being transformed as we inhabit a digital space where planning to a certain rhythmic regularity makes less sense. Millions of people spend their business and leisure, public and private time in this digital 24/7 or what Castells refers to as ‘timeless
9 time’ in which everyone can see exactly when someone inhabited this space last. The space is the ‘space of flows,’ referring to ability of the network to instil simultaneous communication between individuals without being near each other in space; a concept, therefore, comparable to Virilio’s real time. The space of flows deals with asynchronous interaction and chosen time. On the internet, you can choose what you want to engage with or consume regardless of schedules. Of course, it is made out of material infrastructures that reside in real space; however, it is precisely through these electronically connected servers, ISPs, PCs, transatlantic cables and so on, that information flows bring about an almost instantaneous sharing of time. It is this space of flows that gradually alters the experience of modernity:
In the industrial society, which was organized around the idea of progress and the development of productive forces, becoming structured being, time conformed space. In the network society, the space of flows dissolves time by disordering the sequence of events and making them
simultaneous in the communication networks, thus installing society in structural ephemerality: being cancels becoming.
(Castells 35) Timeless time and network time share a lot of the same qualities, but both suffer the same critique: that the experienced temporality of the user still applies. A video still needs to buffer, Skype still suffers from lag and in online video games when one player shoots the bullet might hit seconds later due to connection problems. Speed, connectivity and flexibility are now demanded from the post-Fordist labourer in his or her leisure and work time. Network time and real time, however, are not the same thing. Real time connotes an instantaneity of events; something happening in real time is something shared by people at the same time, therefore, cancelling time itself. Real time leads to the death of time, something is shared simultaneously and, therefore, there is no latency, buffering or loading time (Hassan 89). This, however, does not coincide with network time. The internet gives different experiences of time, different temporalities to different users. If you are using a dial-up modem that connects to the old telephone network, your perception of this ‘real time’ will be
significantly slower than if you have access to a fibre-optic network or an ISDN modem. The technical term for this is ‘latency tolerance,’ referring to the lag between an event and the completion of its computational processing (Mackenzie, 166). This is effectively revealed in online gaming, depending on your internet connection and physical location in relation to other players, you can be confronted with lag. Other players might move quicker than you, or even disappear and reappear closer to your avatar, making you experience a different temporality than the opposing player. This is what network time signifies: not the death of time, not a timeless time, but a shared network of different
temporalities each with their own perception of how time passes, but united in the thirst for speed. The drive for acceleration, to surpass each other, is manifested as the first to post, to be the first to share, the first to have access and, most significantly, the first to purchase, own and sell. Within network-time this is asynchronous; it changes our relationship with the clock significantly, but does
10 not disable the presence of that device. Asynchronous temporality means that the old temporalities of the Nine to Five and Monday to Friday become increasingly complex, multi-layered, extended and potentially undermined; if you work with digital, networked and mobile devices, you can go online at any time of the day and night. This has an impact on what E. P. Thompson famously called ‘task oriented time’ (Thompson 60). Work is divided in tasks, and each task is assigned a certain amount of time to complete. This is an important step in the modulation of the labourer. The labourer is not bound to a space to work in; they do not have to clock into the factory, but can provide services (provided this is a digital one) from virtually any context as long as there is access to the asynchronous network. The post-Fordist labourer can potentially work at anytime they need or want to, they can be available 24/7 and can perform the task assigned or that they assign themselves. Timeslots become modular, therefore, the worker performs acts of modulation through managing this complex set of dynamics and being able to plug-in to the network at any time. The modulated worker can potentially structure their own timeslots and thus create an individualized ritual of work and leisure:
Socialisation by ritual, and by signs, is much more effective than socialisation by energies bound to production. All that is asked of you is not that you produce, nor that you strive to excel yourself (this classical ethic has become rather suspect), but that you be socialised. […] You are no longer brutally snatched away from your daily life to be surrendered to machines; you are integrated in the system, along with your childhood, your habits, your human relations, your unconscious drives, even your rejection of work. […] The important thing is that everyone be a terminal in the network, a lowly terminal, but a term nevertheless – above all, not an inarticulate cry, but a linguistic term, and at the terminus of the whole structural network of language.
(Baudrillard 101, 104-5) It is partially because of this 24/7 task oriented time that leisure time and work time have begun to fuse and become hard to distinguish from one another. Leisure time was clearly defined as the opposite of the working time – the Nine to Five, the Monday to Friday – with the weekend as a complete hiatus from work until Monday arrived. But with the possibility of continuous work comes the possibility of the removal of leisure time. This, however, will not happen, because it is in leisure time that one consumes the commodities that are produced in work time. It is leisure time itself that becomes the commodity. As Guy Debord observed in his influential Society of the Spectacle:
The time of production, time-as-commodity, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent
intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract: each segment must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all other segments. This time manifests nothing in its
effective reality aside from its exchangeability.
(Debord, 46) Debord claims that this commodification of temporality takes the guise of pseudo-cyclical time; a time that echoes the old rhythms of natural, cyclical time, day and night, weekly work and weekly rest and the cycle of vacation. This pseudo-cyclical time is transformed by capital since the time founded on the production of commodities is itself a consumable commodity. The commodification of time,
11 therefore, reassembles what was separated in the old society, private life, economic life and political life into diverse aggregate formations: “the entirety of the consumable time of modern society ends up being treated as raw material for the production of a diversity of new products to be put on the market as socially controlled uses of time” (47). These products can, moreover, take the shape of time appropriated through the consumption of images; “as we know, modern society’s obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered soup, has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours daily watching television” (47). Google Now, in this way, promises to be the contemporary equivalent of Debord’s powdered soup, it will save you time. The function, however, is different of course; powdered soup saves you time because you do not have to buy all the separate ingredients, prepare them and have the broth boil for hours. Instead you just add boiling water, preferably from instant boiling water tap to save you those valuable minutes and seconds and you have almost instant gratification. In the information economy, this seduction works through infinitely flexible convenience:
The information economy, industry of the ‘future’, is here to show us how capitalism itself, in its most advanced forms, organises the relation between affects, desires and technological dispositifs without passing through factory discipline; how it captures, in an open space, each and every one’s affects and desires (without distinguishing between productive and
unproductive, worker subjectivity and whatever subjectivity), finalising them to the production of profit.
(Lazzarato3 159) Google Now’s promise of more time works differently, it does not actually save time because it functions more efficiently than its previous medial equivalents, it saves time because it allows you to
manage your commodified time, this is modulation. It does so in a post-Fordist register through its
promise of providing just the right information at just the right time.
3
Cited and translated by: Toscano, Alberto. "Vital strategies: Maurizio Lazzarato and the metaphysics of contemporary capitalism." Theory, culture & society 24.6 (2007).
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Chapter 2. Stay Connected.
Desire through Control, the Convenience of Marketing.
It would seem logical that The Google Now cards in the second category called ‘Stay Connected’ deal with connecting socially with your friends, but all these cards at least partially deal with advertising products. They show cards giving you notifications on new albums, TV-shows, movies, videogames, concerts, books and what to watch now on Hulu and Netflix. Staying connected predominantly means consuming. Because all these cards are based on your search queries, they are based on what the algorithm dictates you desire most. PageRank filters and personalizes your searches to link these to the cards presented in Google Now to show you where to buy what you desire. Businesses can ‘integrate with Google Now’ to “help your users make the most of your services; give them the right information at just the right time. (Google Now, business integration)” The right information being to consume what they desire. As a company you can add the button, 'add to queue' to an email to your user, when clicked, they add the information from the email to Google’s database and when users query the Google search bar or ask out loud, they will get answers from the email that the company had sent. You ask Google what time the movie starts and it finds this information and replies. Next to this possibility is the reminder function, for example, you can order concert tickets and the venue can send a confirmation with this button, when clicked it will add this to the queue of reminders and prompt you without having to ask. This type of integration is beneficial to corporations and will also further help Google increase the accuracy of their data. This is what you should be doing with the time won by using the free Google Now, in between reading news and blog content, consuming advertising and thus fulfilling desire. This is further enhanced by Google’s recent announcement that they will add a new kind of card that provides advice on where to purchase a product already searched for when you are in the vicinity of a store selling this item:
You’ve been looking for the perfect pair of hiking boots online, but haven’t gotten around to pulling the trigger. Starting today, if you’re out and about and near a store that carries those boots, you might see a Google Now card showing you the product and price to remind you that you wanted them. Now all you have to do is pop into the store and check if they’re in stock! Just be sure to update your #GoogleSearch app for Android now (http://goo.gl/idgt3y) to get the new reminder.
(Google, Official Google+ account) This is effectively where the controversy of Google Now can spark; this means that search engine optimisation is even more important since a store that is not connected to Google when people walk by will be ignored. This is convenience: it saves you time by not having to plan when to buy something, but with the expectation that this surplus time is spent consuming.
13 In this chapter I will focus on the backbone of Google Now, the spreadsheet filled with your data. I will analyze the power relations exerted through managing these data streams and control mechanisms utilized through the marketing they produce. I will start with the control mechanisms that operate within Google by focussing on the creation of the data body. Then I will discuss how these data bodies are linked to our ‘real’ selves and how they influence each other through feedback loops of marketing, clicking, querying, consuming and repeating. In this context, it is worth recalling Gilles Deleuze observations regarding control:
Control is not a discipline. In making freeways, for example, you don’t enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. I am not saying that this is the freeway’s exclusive purpose, but that people can drive infinitely and ‘freely’ without being at all confined yet while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future
(Deleuze, 18). Google’s ideal future is similar. You are free to choose what you want to do – you can walk, cycle, drive and otherwise travel anywhere you want – yet because Google offers you the most convenient route, you inevitably follow and thus are perfectly controlled. Here, Google acts as an intermediary through control mechanisms that profile user data via tethered mobile devices. You make the choice to follow this route because it saves you time, time saved is time you can spend at your leisure. To learn an instrument, maintain a relationship, meet friends or shop all in a constant modulated rhythm of time. This is the penultimate promise of the video discussed in the introduction: through control, time is conquered. This is convenience through managing the modulation of your data body.
According to the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), the data body serves two functions. The first is linked to the state apparatus; authoritarian power always desires complete transparency of the lives of their subjects, and the data body provides this. It achieves this by the dependence of subjects on their interactions with the market (CAE, 146). This part of the data body discussed by the CAE very much resides in the realm of the discipline society described by Michel Foucault (135). With the emergence of the State, the body of their subjects became crucial; they needed to comply to State power. The State formed their subjects using various technologies of power that discipline bodies, these strategies rely on practices that subjugate bodies through biopower. The formation of “populations,” for
instance, is one important result of biopower where bodies are monitored, tracked, and recorded. Birth and death rates were recorded, illnesses were tracked and workers are monitored. Biopower is,
therefore, linked closely with the birth of capitalism,
This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the
machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficulty to govern. If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and
bio-14 politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them.
(Foucault 140-141)
This is where the second function of the data body comes in, since it provides marketers with accurate demographic information of their consumers and allows them to create target populations. Marketing is a current expression of biopower in that it segregates bodies into different institutions, not
necessarily the family, the army, the school and the police, but flexible aggregations based on collected queryable data like age, location and gender. Or even more specific metrics based on the desire expressed in searching for a specific product. This transforms marketing from just the publicizing of a product into a mode of active intervention:
Advertising, which in the nineteenth century was simply the publicizing of a product, before becoming in the twentieth an industry for stimulating desire, is set in the twenty-first century to become pure communication. To this end it will require the unfurling of an advertising space which stretches to the horizon of the visibility of the planet. Global advertising, far from being satisfied with the classic poster or with breaks between TV or radio programmes, now required the imposition of its ‘environment’ on a mass of TV viewers who have in the interim become tele-actors and tele-consumers.
(Virilio 17)
The economy is no longer propelled by need, but fuelled by desire. Marketers need methods to create products that are desired, but not needed. The data body provides the perfect means to do so: it offers insights into spending power, lifestyles and consumption patterns of potential consumers (CAE, 146).
The data body is first developed by the CAE based on the concept of the data double by Mark Poster. The CAE describes it as the total collection of files connected to an individual, a collection in service to corporations and the state (CAE 144). The key difference between the two concepts is that the data double impoverishes the self by reducing it to fields within a database with character length limits, while the data body inhabits all data, no detail about a person’s life is too small to be collected and stored in service of the state or corporations (CAE, 145). The data collected and stored by Google is only a part of the data body of any person since it does not contain all information recorded
somewhere about that person. However, in its uses, it poses the same threat that the CAE warn about. The most concerning aspect of this system is the centrality of the data body to an individual’s social being. According to the CAE, it assigns cultural identities and roles within the authoritarian regimes and its corporate counterparts. From the viewpoint of corporate and government bureaucracies, it is no longer one’s organic being that is the determining factor. The CAE ends their analysis with the
15 counterfeit representation of original data” (146). Here, a reversed causality is posed in
onto-epistemological terms: for institutions, the data now comes first.
Nevertheless, without the organic body producing data – buying smartphones, opting in, and signing up – the data body cannot grow and cannot come to represent the “real” body itself. It is the case, moreover, that almost all people possess a data body, as Richard Rogers notes:
To participate in consumer society, you have to be watched. It’s not so much that resistance is futile. It’s more that there is just too much interactivity. … Having to confirm every cookie, after setting advanced privacy preferences, unleashes a barrage of browser alerts. Eventually one yields back to the default setting, and carries on with ‘whatever.’
(Rogers, 288) It is because of this inability to not participate that most people will have amassed a significant data body. This led Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson to conclude that:
The coalescence of such practices into the surveillant assemblage marks the progressive
‘disappearance of disappearance’ a process whereby it is increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain their anonymity, or to escape the monitoring of social institutions. Efforts to evade the gaze of different systems involves an attendant trade-off in social rights and benefits. Privacy advocates bring this point home in their facetious advice that individuals who are intent on staying anonymous should not use credit, work, vote, or use the Internet.
(Haggerty and Ericson, 619) The data body flourishes as new data is assimilated into it. As a consequence, our data bodies possess significant agencies, including long-term implications through risk assessment and the anticipation of the future (Simon, 16). Bart Simon takes to calling the data body “the databased self,” which differs from the “real selves” by being more accessible, observable, manageable and predictable then we are. It is, consequently, much easier for institutions to control the databased self. This is where discipline as an operation ends and control emerges. The data body only has meaning in relation to the other elements it functions with: consumers commodities and brands. This is where the marketer produces meaning, since they deterritorialize the consumer/user into separate data: their age, location, desires and queries. Such flows of data are then reterritorialized by combining these elements into a possible consumer of a product. The possible consumer is what Google then sells and how they extract surplus value and accrue wealth. Reterritorialization is the moment where different quantified behaviours, needs, expressions of desire that have been freed from fixed codes of expression of the body are put into the universal language of the database and thus recaptured in service of capitalist accumulation (Zwick and Knott 230). This decoding and recoding is a cybernetic feedback loop given how the consumer buys products that are recommended and, therefore, provides the marketers with new information to guide populations to new products. In Google Now, you buy a movie ticket because a pop-up tells you the new Avengers film is out now and it provides a link where you can buy a ticket. In following the link and purchasing a ticket, more information is added to the Google database and the
16 feedback loop continues. The repetitive creation of surplus value through the production of these data bodies is not based on having accurate data or categorizing the acquired database, but on continuously acquiring new data, discarding the old and fine-tuning the algorithmic recoding or reterritorializing techniques. Google does not need to store the data from five years ago, because they constantly refine their algorithm to better code and recode the data collected from you. For a Deleuzian society of control to be established, a feedback loop of deterritorialization and reterritorialisation is needed. The databased self is deterritorialized, made abstract and reterritorialized in the database. This database is a vast source of information that allows for the modulation of the leisure/work time of the consumer.
The most significant way Google’s technology itself is sold is by promising convenience. In the appendix to The Flesh Machine, the CAE describes convenience as one of the five key virtual utopian promises that technology can offer. They describe humans as units in a labor process; however, they are not perfectly working units able to continue production 24/7. These organic units never work at optimum efficiency; humans are distracted by desires. Such desires make them converse with their fellow units about things other than work. The managers and policy makers have to deal with these inefficient impulses and try to maximize work output to intensify labour. The model for this labour intensification was provided by the robot; a very efficient labourer that works through data input. Yet the robot is incapable of independent conceptual thought, and impossible to transform into a human able to do so. As a result, the human must be adapted to be more like the robot through
technology. The CAE mentions wearable telephone headsets and computers as the first step into this bleak future, but these technologies still need to be worn voluntarily, at least until they can be
permanently fixed to humans. Humans, therefore, need to be seduced into wearing these devices. The means of seduction is the promise of convenience,
The means of seduction? Convenience. Life will be so much easier if we only connect to the machine. As usual there is a grain of truth to this idea. I can honestly admit that my life has been made easier since I began using a computer, but only in a certain sense. As a writer, it is easier for me to finish a paper now than it was when I used pen and paper or a typewriter. The problem: Now I am able to (and therefore, must) write two papers in the time it used to take to produce one. The implied promise that I will have more free time because I use a computer is false.
(Critical Art Ensemble, 148)
Because people can still separate themselves from their workstations, the seduction of convenience transcends the workplace into leisure time. In this context, the CAE give a compelling example of an AT&T commercial that is remarkably similar to Glass and by extension Google Now:
The latest commercials from AT&T are the perfect representation of consumer seduction. They promise: “Have you ever sent a fax...from the beach? You will.” or “Have you ever received a phone call...on your wrist watch? You will.” This commercial is most amusing. There is an image of a young man who has just finished climbing a mountain, and is watching a sunset. At that moment his wife calls on his wrist phone, and he describes the magnificence of the sunset to her.
17 Now who is kidding who? Is your spouse going to call you while you are mountain climbing? Are you going to need to send a fax while lounging on the beach? The corporate intention for
deploying this technology (in addition to profit) is so transparent, it’s painful. The only possible rejoinder is: “Have you ever been at a work station...24 hours a day, 365 days a year? You will.” Now the virtual sweat shop can go anywhere you do!
(Critical Art Ensemble, 148)
The promise of more time shines through here and is accompanied by the threat of no more free time. The threat this 24/7 flow poses is elegantly described in the book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of
Sleep by Jonathan Crary. It posits the same flexible, modular worker, and elaborates on why this
worker operates in the 24/7 temporality. The last undistorted bastion of capitalism is free time: sleep is being assaulted and may well be assimilated into the continuous marketplace that is late capitalism. Crary opens by describing a US military initiative to produce a sleepless soldier. The goal is to increase the time that soldiers remain awake and active using drugs, seeking to extend their waking time from days to weeks. Military technologies often seep through to civilian life: the internet, air travel, GPS, assault weapons and, indeed, pharmaceuticals. Friedrich Kittler writes extensively about military technology being adapted and repurposed by for civilians, like the first radio show:
But that’s the way it goes. The entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army equipment. When Karlheinz Stockhausen was mixing his first electronic
composition, Kontakte, in the Cologne studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk between February 1958 and fall 1959, the pulse generator, indicating amplifier, band-pass filter, as well as the sine and square wave oscillators were made up of discarded U.S. Army equipment: an abuse that produced a distinctive sound.
(Kittler, 97) Therefore, there is reason to believe that this sleepless soldier might be a possible template for the sleepless worker. All other human necessities have been turned into commodities: hunger, thirst, sexual desire and the need for friendship. All are already part of the 24/7 economy. To completely commodify free time would be to rectify the fact that “sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism” (Crary, 10).
One of the reasons for this pervasive subsumption is the permeability between times of work and times of leisure discussed in the first chapter. The skills and gestures that accompany work are now part of everyday life. Factory workers who had to cope with the monotony of repetitive labor had to seek their satisfaction from somewhere other than artisanal craft. A sense of accomplishment was therefore found in efficiency; they identified with the mechanic processes that surrounded them and emulated these rhythms, this dynamism and performance (Crary 57). They began to take pride in their productivity. This productivity and search for efficiency is still present in late capitalism, but is not restricted to work time, it has flowed into leisure time. In Evil Media, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey similarly describe the concept of workflow as an imperative to design the social relations into which people are inserted as a set of patterns. The experts in this pseudo-scientific field of workflow
18 categorize the repeating patterns in work activity in terms of how these patterns support control over the work process:
Experts in the workflow community typically categorize general and recurring patterns of work activity in terms of how these patterns bear on control over the work process, the distribution and availability of data, the specification and allocation of human and nonhuman resources and the handling of exceptions.
(Fuller and Goffrey, 106)
To optimize these patterns into saving time and, therefore, create the opportunity to produce more efficiently is to increase workflow. I propose that through new tools of convenience, the same flow optimization is happening, but now extended into leisure time. What productivity is to workflow, convenience is to leisure flow. Both multiply the means of control and create a merging of flows that sustains the 24/7 economy. The products that bring about this efficiency of leisure time are sold to the users as convenience. Tools like Google Glass and applications like Google Now allow for a “greater harmonization with the intrinsic functional requirement continually to reduce the time of any exchange or operation” (Crary, 58). This desire to reduce the time of any operation is blatantly visible in the Glass promotional video when the user impresses his girlfriend with being able to play the ukulele and impresses the viewer with the short amount of time this takes to learn.
All of this has been made possible by a device that tells you how to achieve this efficiency, and which bestows control to and from the user. The Tiqqun collective as described by Crary states that the modern inhabitant of the urban society has become pliable and, therefore, susceptible to this control. Even when we are not forced to obey instructions, we choose to do what we are told to do; we allow our bodies to be managed, our ideas, our entertainment and all our imaginaries needs to be externally suggested. We buy products that have been recommended to us through monitoring of our electronic data and we allow ourselves to be submitted to surveillance based on the same data. For Crary, this is “the absolute abdication of responsibility for living” (60). These pliable inhabitants are the ideal citizens of the control society described by Deleuze. In his diagrammatic view of how society functions after the discipline, control manifests in the change from nineteenth century capitalism to today’s capitalism. Nineteenth century capitalism involved a concentration of Foucauldian discipline; it produced property and the enclosed space of the Factory. The capitalist owned the means of production. The worker resided in enclosed spaces: the school, the family house and the factory all functioned through discipline. The capitalist conquers markets by specializing in a certain product, lowering the price of production or sometimes by colonizing other markets. Deleuze describes that capitalism has changed: it is still involved in production, but this is outsourced to the Third World, even the complex forms of production like oil production and modern day computers are being built in developing countries. Capitalism does not buy the raw materials, but the finished product or assembled parts. Of course capitalism is still very much operational in the second and third world, but it is more a
19 capitalism guided by discipline there, and one of control here. It is a capitalism not based on
production, but on the product, but more important it focuses on marketing (Deleuze, 320). It should be acknowledged that these dynamics refer to the cutting edge of contemporary capitalism or the informational mode of production. It is in this realm of marketing, the segmentation of populations through a digital biopower, a biopower over the databody, that convenience resides. The way that this control is made possible lies in the ability to express an individual in data, to make it quantifiable and comparable to the masses. This is what Deleuze describes as the dividual. This is most clear in his comparison of the function of the hospital between discipline society and control society. Here, the hospital is replaced by risk assessment; there will no longer be a doctor who decides if a patient is sick, it will be the data available. The diagnosis is made through the assessment, measurement and storage of the dividual. This is different from the Foucauldian notion of biopower, of measuring and keeping track of the body to restrict its mobility and discipline its subjects, because control is not bound to the same enclosing space that the hospital was. The assessment of the risk of illness by measuring the dividual does not necessarily restrict or enclose the body. The dividual cannot be disciplined in this way, it can only be controlled. The data that is available about a person, about a user, about a consumer or a patient, its data body that is the dividual; that is where control operates. Discipline is not replaced by control, one only has to look at the material labour conditions in China, where workers emerge from there enclosed barracks and move to the factory to see that discipline conditions persist globally. Indeed, it is because of the computers build under these conditions that control is possible and immaterial labour conditions are supported. The computer lies very much at the centre of Deleuzian control:
The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines-levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses.
(Deleuze, 318) The control society revolves around this field of tension between the dividual and the individual, all of which is expressed in digital language. What Foucault described as docile bodies – a body “that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault 136) – is augmented by bodies of code, bodies to which no discipline can be applied, yet control is also possible (Deleuze 319). Docile bodies were created in disciplinary societies by arranging space so as to confine the body, to enforce rules and laws and to emphasize self-control as a way of doing this. Teaching self-control led to the process of individuation, of becoming an individual in the mass of people co-inhabiting space, which was further emphasized by space being divided up into clear “cells” with clear inhabitants. This segmentation of space allowed for differentiation from the masses, you become a “you,” an individual. However, this duality of being an individual in the mass of individuals changes in control society: “we’re no longer
20 dealing with duality of mass and individual. Individuals become “dividuals” and masses become samples, data, markets, or “banks” (Ibid. 319). In the mass of the database an individual is lost; it is deterritorialized and only a part of the mass collection of fluid parts. It is here that capital
reterritorializes and creates surplus value by creating an aggregation based on all the free floating parts in the database that it can link together and sell as advertisable. Thus users are at least partially
commodified. This is the feedback loop that operates in the Stay Connected category of Google Now. The users get a notification that the new Florence and The Machine album is released, this notification is based on the stored expression of desire, the stored query for this band. This data double is then confirmed by clicking the link and preferably buying the album. It is the dividual that fuels the feedback loop op this control mechanism of informational capitalism.
21
Chapter 3. Be a Local.
Quantifying Locality as Commodified Desire.
The last category of Google Now cards is about being perceived as a local in a foreign place. The promise Google makes here is that location does not matter as long as you use this software gadget. It translates all you want to know with Glass, it can even superimpose translated words onto the OCR reading of an original language so that with Glass you will only see the language you know. The notion of being a stranger in a foreign place is something that needs to be eliminated in this practice. There is a card that shows you at what time the bus leaves, a card to tell you of the events you might be interested in, a currency calculator and a card telling you what bars, restaurants or other places of interest are nearby. These cards deal with being a local in an urban space that is foreign to you and defines this locality by joining the flow of that city. As you walk through the city, "interesting" things to do, view or consume pop up. The keyword for this group of cards is location; all of this is possible through a combination of your GPS location and what your data double says is interesting in the city you are visiting. Google Now acts as a guide through these urban spaces by utilising the control mechanisms of location and the data double. In ‘Postscript on Control Societies,’ Deleuze discusses the city by citing his frequent co-author and collaborator, Félix Guattari:
Félix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position-licit or illicit -and effects a universal modulation.
(Deleuze, 321)
Guattari’s example of a card allowing access or possibly not working is transformed by the mediated locality of Google Now. It is not about a card allowing you entry, but about being guided in a grid through the cityscape towards significant places. Being in a store, museum, bar or restaurant is crucial, since money can be spent there. This is not about denying access, but about providing control by managing time based on quantified desires and being placed on a map of desirable locations. Google is interested in the calculable and mappable dimensions of desire. In an interview with Eric Schmidt in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, he explains what he sees as the future of Google then, the future that we are experiencing Now:
Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block. Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of
22 powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating – that serendipity – can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically," Mr. Schmidt says.
(Holman W. Jenkins Jr.) Calculable serendipity is what Google finds fascinating. In this context, the elimination of chance is what makes Google's aims so paradoxical and what exposes the dominant mode of thought at play. Reducing chance as an aleatory occurrence to a mathematically calculable event implies predictability. Indeed, these techniques result in quantifying the user as a target for advertising.
This location based targeted advertising is made possible by the categorisation of Places of Interest (POIs). As Carlos Barreneche discusses in a comparison between Flickr and Foursquare and how they deal with creating these POI's, this practice creates business-biased vocabularies that are pivotal to governing population mobility flows (Barraneche). He reflects on the algorithmic function at the centre of Flickr’s POIs by analysing their patents, adding the disclaimer that these patented
algorithms have now been transformed, improved and changed so that they deviate from their original description, yet still function in much the same way. Flickr's algorithm of “interestingness” roughly functions in this way:
1. Quantity of social metadata linked to the respective media object (tags, comments, additions to favourites, additions to groups, annotations), or quantification of attention metadata as it were. 2. Access pattern to the media object (number of clickthroughs or views of the media object). 3. Number of users contributing with metadata.
4. Social relations between users. For instance, photo comments from a user predefined as friend or family member may carry a different weight than a comment made by a casual user.
5. Time varying behaviour of all these factors.
(Barraneche 2012) Flickr’s algorithms produce POIs through categorizing and ascribing value to human produced
metadata. Google’s algorithms function in much the same way; if a friend shares a media object on Google+, you up vote something by clicking the Google+ button or email someone using Gmail. But the most important aspect of Google’s algorithms for ranking what information is interesting to the user, and by extension to the marketer, is still PageRank. Of course, this has evolved greatly from just the number of incoming links and their quality to establish which websites are ranked higher than others. PageRank is constantly updated, modified, tested and revised and its result even manually altered (Grimmelmann 945). The much discussed personalized results update in 2005 is one that perhaps influenced Google's search the most, it certainly lies at the birth of Google Now (Sep Kamvar). This update made it possible for Google to adapt the search results for users based on their previous searches. Personalised results are made possible by storing these previous search results and by calculating which topics might be of interest. By clicking the link, the user confirms for the
23 fed. The spaces of interestingness concerning these experienced localities are defined by another part of Google Now’s function that is different from Flickr. Google Now keeps track of your movements through the map if you allow the location based GPS to be active. It even uses the location history of maps if you have agreed to that in the past. As the privacy policy states:
If you opted in to Location History in the past, Google Now uses your previously recorded locations as well as ongoing locations when making suggestions. Turning off Location History pauses the collection of location information, but it doesn't delete your history.
(Google Now privacy policy) This allows Google to see where you have been – the shops, the family home or the workplace; and when in doubt, it asks the user to confirm their home and work address. Google does not need your Foursquare check-ins to know what businesses you visit as it can see the locations of the businesses you actually visit, not only the ones you check in. Cross-referenced with your data doubles list of desires expressed in search history Google guide through the economy of interestingness of the urban landscape it helps create. Google's combined algorithm is different from the economy of affect generated by the expression of tagging, adding and commenting that happens in Flickr’s geotagged pictures; however from Google's point of view the query itself is a value of something over something else. So when Barraneche claims the following about Flickr:
This model measures social relations as they are expressed in the object. Affect should be read in this context then in terms of relationality i.e. the intensive relations between social networks and media objects. What carries the most weight would be the degree of responsiveness, that is to say, that further engagement with the object after it has caught the user attention (a photo view). Whether the object mobilizes an affective response in the form of a further act of communication: commenting, adding tags or notes, and foremost favouriting an object.
(Barraneche) Google would claim that the same affect is expressed in repeated searches of an object, be it a
mediated object or not, search is an expression of desire, or affect. In tagging, commenting and sharing, however, affect is more clearly expressed, because people express how they feel about certain objects, in search it might be present but not expressed. In Flickr, a grammatization of affect occurs, where the former is understood as “technical processes that enable behavioural fluxes or flows to be made discrete (in the mathematical sense) and to be reproduced” (Stiegler 32). Affectual behaviour is, therefore, transcribed into the flows of tags and comments that are made discrete by Flickr’s
algorithm. The key difference between Flickr’s photostream and Google Now’s reminders is that Flickr makes what is real virtual and Now reverses this process: it takes what is virtually expressed in search and transcribes it to location. In this respect, the taxonomies of space in platforms like Flickr and Foursquare emerge differently: Flickr uses the geographic location i.e. Europe, the Netherlands,
