If you’re young enough to recall early 1990s and old enough to have laughed about it, you probably remember that New Yorker cartoon where a dog tells another dog that you can be anyone on the Internet. Because on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. It was funny then because it was true. And because it was one of the most important things about the Internet aside from the connectivity it brought.
How freeing, right? At that time, there was nothing more liberating than the possibility to be literally anyone; the possibility we were suddenly given by the gods of technology that came to our service. We could take different fragments of our identity, real or ideal, and create personas to represent us in the digital world. These personas would then happily interact with similar creations by other people. What we did or said one day could be retracted (or better yet, forgotten) the next, and no one was the wiser.
It has been 26 years since the publication of this cartoon and our online interactions are no longer with individuals who have the ability to forget. The social platforms and mobile aps that we use are brought to us by businesses. Businesses that collect even the tiniest pieces of our identity and use them to zoom in on who we are and what offers we will respond better to.
Technology might have indeed come to serve us; it’s just that „us” is no longer you and me. It’s no longer this or that individual sitting in front of a monitor. In this new world, we might just be pawns in a much bigger game.
authors: Jagoda Szulia, Jakub Zarembiński