Mercer, Mae and Timberlands

I have never, not once, been exposed to temperatures lower than 50F.

Given that last week, at the end of August, the temperature dropped to a 46-degree low, I thought it was wise to invest in a good pair of boots. After asking a couple of my more winter-savvy friends, I went on the Timberland website, looked around for a bit, and- not satisfied by the options- logged off.


When I opened Facebook yesterday, my feed looked something like this:

Also, how did they know I now live in Pennsylvania?

I want to draw attention at the boots in the sidebar: the same exact boots I was looking at not a week before. It's not only Facebook though:

                                                                       Absolutely no aesthetic.

Tumblr, the secluded, pseudo-indie microblogging platform where I ran away from the pointless stream of useless information that Facebook bombards me with. However, now it seems like I can't open any social media platforms without coming face to face (or, well, screen-to-face) with these advertisements for boots I didn't even like.

For some reason, I feel like this is an enormous breach of privacy.

Of course, I could clear my cookies and browser's cached information, but then all my useful login details (usernames, passwords, general preferences) would be erased. I wish there could be a way to maintain my browsing privacy without hindering my online experience: a way of limiting the availability of my information to every company I visit, while still saving my preferences on the sites that I do wish to have them on.

I feel my point of view is somewhere between Mae Holland's and Mercer's, from The Circle. While Mae Holland aims to be fully connected, or "close the circle" (in Eamon Bailey's words), Mercer isn't fully on board with this idea. Much like Mercer, I don't believe that companies should be able to "scan(...) all of our messages for information they can monetize" (p. 135). It's creepy, the way all websites know I attend Penn State, am concerned about eating disorders and diets, and always display ads about these topics in whatever website I visit:

Mae herself kind of comes into contact with this, at the LuvLuv presentation, where she feels that "having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, the real you" (p. 126) is distorted. In much the same way, I think the storing of my information reduces me to "an algorithm", and no matter how accurate it is, it will never be able to describe me in totality. It's scary, to imagine being classified as a series of numbers, and reduced to my Google searches, the products I browse, and the places I visit.

However, I do admit that getting targeted ads is useful, as opposed to only getting random ones, and sometimes I'll even click the link to buy what they're selling. I feel like there needs to be some sort of streamlining online in order to have an enjoyable experience and interaction, and this is only achieved by a certain customizing of "private" information that must be made public. In some way, it's not being coded, but being understood. And that, in a sense, is very comforting.

In this way, I'm more like Mae: pragmatic, I know that "the future" includes different definitions of "privacy" and "communication" to what we have now, and don't want to be left behind in the wake of evolution. I see how useful it is for companies to "manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs" (p. 134), and how the storage of personal information helps the internet feel much more personal than a plethora of randomly-generated ads would.

So, in conclusion, I know that a big place like the internet can be made to feel smaller (and more personal) through interaction with the individual users, and this can only be done by storing certain information about everyone. However, it is worrying and kind of annoying to feel "followed" by all these companies and ads, like a  good song stuck in the back of your head for so long it became boring. What do you think? Is a personalized online experience a good price to pay for your private information and habits being dispersed around the internet?