What the Google ruling tells us about our digital delusion

It is 10 years since the NO2ID campaign launched, generating a groundswell of public concern about a government-controlled identity card system. Look how far we have come: happy, it seems, to hand exponentially more revealing data about ourselves over to vast, private companies who can use it for their own commercial gain.They not only own and oversee our names, our contacts and our locations, they also mediate our relationships, providing a platform for our messages and even profiles that describe the intimacy of our relationships. Our personal histories, too, are increasingly defined by what Google serves up about us. It is, as any recruiter will tell you, the face you show to the world. Mario Costeja Gonzále's legal victory today against Google establishes a right to determine what this public face looks like. It is remarkable that technology has brought us so far that our own representation in the world is already so far out of our control.The disruptive impact of new technologies is profound – affecting how we work, learn, travel and, crucially, how we communicate and relate to the world. Until now, most of us have rather naively poured ourselves into these new tools and opportunities for self-expression – teenagers of the web perhaps, optimistic about the opportunities it seems to offer. Edward Snowden's revelations about surveillance were the first real wake-up call; confirmation of the most cynical suspicions, the end of trust even.But how we express and understand our own identities is being challenged too. Social networks, now the primary means of communication for many, are complex and multifaceted, entwining the self-selected identity with spontaneous encounters. Facebook's own aspiration to map the world's social graph is unachievable; it has scale, but could the complex nuance of human social relationships ever be satisfactorily expressed through such a process? Facebook is a business, and as such needs to codify relationships into a system it can monetise. Real relationships are more ambient, more fluid, more or less significant than a Facebook organisational label can imply.Yet Facebook is training our minds to structure our relationships in certain ways. What long-term effect will this have? There are also profound philosophical questions raised by relationships being mediated by a system that presents heavily self-selected identities, either consciously or subconsciously. Experimenting with identities is a natural and healthy exploration for young people, yet the internet magnifies and normalises everything from the trivial to the very darkest of interests, particularly where anonymity is allowed.If we believe the internet folklore of anthropologist Robin Dunbar, every human being has psychological space for 150 relationships of varying depth and complexity at any one time. We have all experienced different friendships at different times in our lives, the ebb and flow of different jobs or homes. When we drift away from friends after college perhaps it is because there is only room for so many true relationships in our lives.We hear a lot about big data, but less about the unsustainable human cost of being utterly overwhelmed. We are unsophisticated and unrealistic in the information we pour online, naively trusting of the places we store it and woefully illiterate about the implications of doing so. More services will spring up to help us manage our data and our online identities, but we also need to take responsibility for our behaviour. This means asserting control over the giant web companies, those that monetise our lives but also hold our memories, our communications – everything down to our location.The digital illusion – the seeming "magic" of the internet – means we don't question their power because we are only too grateful to join in. In the real world, we would never allow such powerful mediators of our lives and our connections, such auctioneers of our identities. But having given so much away, how will we ever take it back?(theguardian.com)Bakudaily.az