We all know the idea of “finding yourself.” It’s the motto of your yoga studio and the go-to advice from your therapist. It’s a spiritual journey, a social trend, a philosophical question, a great romcom theme, and a clever marketing hook — nothing sells a trip to Bali faster. But what if I am not the only one that is trying to find myself? Countless companies are constantly deciding who I am based on my data points and their algorithm.
Big tech platforms are an integral part of our lives and make a lot of decisions for us based on our data. Yet, we are not looking into our data self on a regular basis. Considering we are always trying to find ourselves in some way, we could use the knowledge these platforms hold. They are, after all, the masters of finding us.
You always have an idea in your mind of who you are. Maybe you are still discovering big parts of it or maybe you’ve quite found this person already. But this is not the only version of you.
A lot of platforms observe your behavior. Every click, like, message or scroll will be collected and translated into data. Data are pieces of information. One of these pieces will tell you very little about yourself, but the whole package they collect is a digital representation of you as a person. The person a platform believes you are. Based on this data self a platform recommends things to you, because if they know you will like something, it is much more probable that you purchase this or stay longer on the app.
Compared to other platforms Instagram (Meta) offers a pretty clear overview of the data they collect about you. They say little about how they exactly use it and it takes quite some steps to acces it, but they do give you data pieces that are understandable.
But then? What happens if you found this list of data pieces. What does it say? And what do you do with it? We are not used to interact with our data self. We never learned how to and we are not used to this confrontation. This is why I created The Data Self-Discovery. An experience in which I guide social media users to discover their data self by visualizing and reflecting on their personal data.
