There’s a running joke in my family that if a black helicopter is circling, it’s the government come to collect me. This concern for my inevitable apprehension is mostly due to my admittedly odd surfing habits. I’ve googled everything from hotwiring a car to the chemical composition of C-4. (Hey, I was curious.) Anyway, JTF-2 has yet to break down my front door, lay siege to my house and confiscate my laptop, but at this point, it’s only a matter of time.
But before you write me off as a psychopath, think about what you look for when you surf the web. Here’s an interesting exercise—go through your browsing history sometime. Look at where you started and compare it to where you ended up. Are they on the same topic or are they vastly different? What about the middle of your surfing session? Can you pinpoint a place where your interest veered into something else?
If you’re like me, chances are, your browsing history is pretty predictable. There are some sites that you go to every time you go online. Some sites may be new if you heard about them from a friend or followed a link from a regularly visited page or have a new research project you need to get started on, but by and large, the sites you visit—especially those you go to immediately upon opening your browser—are those you’ve looked at time and time again.Let me give you an example. Every time I open my browser, the first thing I do is check my university webmail. After that, I usually check my hotmail. Then, with those things out of the way, I get down to doing whatever it is I need to do—usually involving Google and research for school papers.
“But what does this have to do with identity?” you cry. Plenty.
You might have gathered from the first paragraph that I’m interested in a wide variety of semi-criminal topics. Also, you might have gathered that I’m a pretty nutty person. Some of you may now fear me because of my dubious sanity. Really, it’s all a matter of opinion.
If you consider my habit of checking webmail and hotmail every time I open a browser, you might calm down a little. My compulsive need to check my webmail all the time (due largely in part to the insane volume of emails I get from group projects in practicum courses) shows that I’m a generally studious person terrified of missing a deadline or learning some important bit of information too late. My visiting hotmail, while not noteworthy, shows that I am generally a sociable person who likes to keep in touch with far-flung friends and family.
All this from a throwaway comment about googling and a list of my top two most visited web sites.
But these surfing habits shape me as much as they reflect my interests and values. I’ve noticed that my constant need to be connected and current when it comes to my studies and my friends has morphed into a mild paranoia about missing something important. Now, more than ever before, I feel the need to write things down so I don’t forget, making lists and lists of everything from homework, to chores, to when I’m meeting friends to see a movie.
If I looked at my browsing history every day for a month, I could give you a more comprehensive picture of who I am and what I’m like, and how my surfing has shaped my identity. Of course, I’m not sure I want anyone to know that much about me.
There are some things that just shouldn’t be shared.
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I recently looked up a powerful hallucinogenic drug called DMT (take a look :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine). It was interesting. That led me to looking up other drugs, like Speed. I wonder what people would think if they saw my browsing history. O.O
ReplyDeleteI think you're right that our browsing history can tell something about our interests, but what about when you accidentally hit the link of a site with... less than proper content (from a pop-up, say)? You might be misunderstood. :P
That's an excellent point, Pierre, and it does happen. I can't count the number of times some strange pop-up appeared on my screen that was either creepy or just plain weird. Or sometimes you click a link which proports to be one thing and ends up being something else.
ReplyDeleteBUT. This is still meaningful to my mind. A lot of web developing tools can tell the author of a web page a whole bunch of stuff about the user, including which link they followed to get there. I think we can apply this idea to thinking about our surfing habits. Even an inadvertant click can tell us where we've been--we can reverse engineer our sessions, and analyse that as well as our intentional browsing.