Die wunderbare Kollegin Renée Ridgeway hat eine Dissertation zum Thema The Personalised Subject vs. the Anonymous User vorgelegt, die frei abrufbar im Netz zum Download bereitsteht.
Renée war im weiteren Umfeld des Reconfiguring-Anonymity-Projektes und liefert mit dieser Arbeit weitere Einblicke und Erkenntnisse zum Thema Anonymität im Netz und in der digitalen Welt. Es geht um Google, TOR und eine Art von Autoethnographie im digitalen Raum. Lesenswert.
This thesis investigates how Google Search as a ‘media a priori’ organises (us)ers by first delving into how search worked in the past, engaging former European ‘address offices’ and human endeavours that attempted to ‘organise the world’s information’. It then explains how Google search developed during the last two decades, advancing an understanding that Re:search fuses two concepts: the Scientific Citation Index (SCI) for research, which in turn served as an inspiration for the PageRank of Google Search. Using my office at CBS as a site of data collection, I designed and carried out an ‘experiment in living’, searching with Google as the ‘Personalised Subject’ and with Tor as the ‘Anonymous User’, with the same set of chosen keywords. Whilst conducting ‘interviews’ with algorithms––invisible interlocutors––I collected data on myself and produced Re:search – Terms of Art. These ‘data visualisations as transcription’ reflect my search results based on ‘locative data’ (Google) or ‘off the map’ (Tor), and these ‘critical cartographies’ as practices of representation seek to intervene and give shape to the world by making invisible infrastructures more tangible.