Tailored and customized clothing designed to fit your body contours is often referred to as "haute couture".
Eli Pariser opens our eyes to what he calls the 'filter bubble' wherein the modern day digital algorithms seems to be snipping, cutting, contouring and filtering out information for each one of us like haute couture. He gives examples of Google's search engine which decides what information caters to your interests and other social media channels such as YouTube and Facebook customizes the feed as per the digital understanding of your personality, likes and interests. Such tailoring sounds fine as long as you agree to remain in the customized bubble created especially for you but that defeats the definition of the Internet which promised to connect us to the world wide web.
However, one can argue that the world wide web information is enormous and hence it is inevitable and perhaps even intelligent to create a digital bubble which caters to our personality and interests. What one needs to then question is the integrity and authority of such
tailoring which seems to assume the power of couturing for us as per
their assumptions of our vital statistics. Furthermore these vital stats have a potential to change and does this couture culture allow such a change? Inventor of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee himself is concerned of this couture culture and compares it to the Eagles number 'Hotel California', where you can check-out anytime you like but you can never leave.
James Smythe in his short story, “Trapped in a vortex of their own trivia” creates a hypothetical situation in which a user fails to realize that a war has
broken out, because his internet feed simply supplies him with endless
reviews of war films. Is it possible for us to break free of such a matrix, how can we be more vigilant of what information about us is becoming public or that we are going to be judged by. Are the current privacy settings and choices on the social media and search engines enough to prevent such a scenario? Can we become smart enough to construct a desired data-mining avatar that fits our needs? There are proxy servers such as "hide my ass" and secured 'https' and cached browsing patterns which hides your digital footprint as illustrated by Colin Jacobs however it is not established how much is still visible to powerful data-miners such as Google. Julian Assange's statement that, "the Internet is the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen" sounds appropriate to describe such an "Information Couture".
