Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Fiona Enright

Socially-Elected Search Results

"In the early days of Google, the company operated on what Zuboff calls a behavioural value reinvestment cycle: “(Google’s) User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services: enhancements that were also offered at no cost to users” (Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at The New Frontier of Power. Publicaffairs. March 3, 2020. Print. 69). This model was mutually beneficial to the user and the company: users provided raw data to Google, and Google was able to continually expand and improve their search engine with a constant, high-volume, no-cost flow of data. By providing their data to Google, the user experience improved. More user data meant that Google’s algorithm at the time, Pagerank, could provide information quicker and with greater accuracy. In this system, the user is not a customer, worker, or a product; they do not pay for the service, nor are they paid by the service. And rather than existing as a product, “...we (users) are the sources of raw-material supply” (Zuboff 70)." Fiona Enright. 'Section IV, Part b' The Human Element: Information, Knowledge and Art in the Digital Episteme. 2021.