Bokelskere.no

This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge. What’s unsettling isn’t so much that ‘they’ know something about me that I considered private, hidden – though that’s unpleasant, it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect me from ‘them’; more disconcerting is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that I’m not who I think I am – one’s complete dissipation into data that is now being manipulated by someone else.