Reading 4 - Franki Abraham

Alright, TMI time: I own a lace-up corset. Granted!--I purchased it for a risqué nun's costume this past Halloween but still... I own it and it lends itself to this post. 

Now, unfortunately (or fortunately) Greencastle does not have a costume and/or lingerie shop established within it's tiny self-respecting town and I wanted, no, needed a corset to make my costume the most legitimate Sexy Nun costume ever. So, to the internet! I found a corset, purchased it, and it arrived to my sorority step about four days later.

But little did I know that my simple "sexy black corset" engine search would be the catalyst of a long and embarrassing relationship between my internet and I. You see, I did not know that by searching for such a specific item, that my "wants" would be logged away deep into the loins of Google and used against me. Suddenly, every advertisement, banner and pop-up after that search was promoting 50% off garter sales, "LAST CHANCE" $20 honeymoon slips and the promiscuous like. Any day of the week, the sides of my Facebook would be detailed in carefully positioned models displaying the skimpiest of lingerie.

My life was lacy trimmed hell for a good four months. That is until I searched for Adventure Time BMO Flask. But I digress.

The point of this story is that this was my first saucy encounter with algorithmic cyber-capitalism that is now the internet. I could not understand how or why my internet was so insistent in showing me the ghost of purchases past but now I see that it was because I created my own specific internet environment with the click of a link and now Google has no idea what I truly want. But this is how the Internet is involving itself in our daily lives, Sandra Alvaro says in her article: "The Power of Algorithms: How software formats the culture".

"Algorithms also process data generated by our online actions to suggest what books we should buy on Amazon, what videos we should watch on YouTube, and to determine the advertisements we will be shown on all these platforms."

&

"The examples mentioned here illustrate how information on the Internet is accessed and indexed automatically, based on data drawn from our online behavior. Our actions generate a flow of messages that modify the inextricable mass of interconnected data, subtly changing our shared memory." 

So it is my fault and mine alone that I am still receiving requests as to what shade of red I want my waist to be cinched into. However, I find it incredibly fascinating that this is not the only way algorithms are being used currently. I have also been exposed to the annoying yet addicting online "game" that is...

Cleverbot.

Which isn't always all that clever. But it does have it's moments and is a prime example of the artificial intelligence being consistently created through these processing algorithms.