The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism - Features - Internet standards and a Free Society - Excerpt

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Richard Miranda Zuniga

Currently there exists a strong corporate push to get consumers to use the Web as a personal storage bin. As artist Brooke Singer points out in an interview:

Prompted by new technologies and the promises they hold, or that we are told they hold, our lives are moving more and more into the digital domain, which in turn enables corporate and federal surveillance. For instance, it looks like the music we listen to whether at work, at home or in the car will be accessed via the Web in some way. What does it mean that some corporate provider will most likely be able to know what music we listen to, when it is playing, for how long it stays on and which songs we choose to repeat over and over? Digital TV is a big promise, too. Maybe it's vaporware so far, but there is a big hype for it, so the programs we watch will be equally surveyed and analyzed. And then there is this democratic hope of interactive TV, which no doubt will involve more bland stuff like the People's Choice Awards, In the drive to digitize everything, we are allowing for our movements and choices to be put under the microscope. In the end the data gathered will only be used to manipulate movements and desires. That is why it is collected and stored in the first place. (6)

The corporate data warehouse contains a wide variety of data used for decision support and analytical processing. Relational database systems integrate workers and disparate pieces of information. For example, many operational systems used in production to run day-to-day business operations of a company may dynamically and periodically load new data into the warehouse in batch mode via a network direct-path option. In addition to the data a company may already own, it can purchase data from external data providers to add to its warehouse. A company may buy information about socioeconomic demographics to more closely monitor and target consumers. By adding demographic data for existing and potential customers, selected marketing can be performed, targeting those who are most likely to respond to a sales promotion. Demographic data can furthermore be used to help choose a location to place a new retail store. The data warehouse facilitates highly sophisticated analysis, reporting, online analytical processing a nd, to introduce an emerging term, data mining. Data mining is part of the knowledge discovery process. By using statistical techniques, vast quantities of data can be transformed into useful information. Data is like the raw material extracted from traditional mines: when turned into information, it is like a precious metal. Data mining allows business to extract previously unknown pieces of information from their warehouse and use it to make important business decisions. (7) This practice has become such a prominent tool for marketing that corporations will go to surreptitious lengths to acquire more statistics. In January, The New York Times reported that "thousands of Internet users who installed popular software for sharing music and other computer files also unwittingly accepted a program that tracked their Web surfing habits...The program collects information about sites visited over the last two days to better place ads." (8)