![]() It would take a Borgesian team of spies covering the world to collect that same amount of data just by watching you! There is no analogue substitute that can equally well serve Google Calendar’s primary purpose. It wants your friends’ and your neighbors’ data. It wants your data, and it keep wanting it, and more of it. You could easily make your appointments with pen and paper instead (perhaps you do!), and anyhow you do not want much from those records: just that they get you to where you’re going, and maybe help you remember some of where you’ve been. Heck, you likely don’t even put all of your appointments into your calendar!īoth Google Calendar and the appointments you make there are purpose-built, but we can say that Google Calendar is far more intensively purposive than your appointments. You create the appointment to help yourself do something, and it is of little use to you after that something is finished. You could as easily have made the appointment in an analogue, physical calendar or appointment book (though coordinating with others would look different). The appointment you make in Google Calendar is also purpose-built, but not in a strong sense. #Artifact digital full#Its makers are consciously negotiating the constraints of digital media in a very full way they are writing code, designing user experiences. It exists (primarily) to serve its makers’ financial interests, and accomplishes that by (secondarily) helping its users to organize their lives. It is intended to endure and to continue working over time. Google Calendar is a purpose-built digital artifact in a strong sense. Perhaps you’ll look back through your digital calendar at some point, trying to remember what you did at a certain moment, but more often, you will not. But for you, the major purpose of the digital artifact that is your appointment is achieved once the appointed time and date arrive and pass. Many web pages, for instances, are saved in the internet archives of the Wayback Machine - recorded there for posterity. And, even beyond digital calendars and the like, most digital artifacts are remembered by somebody or something, somewhere. You enter the relevant data, the appointed time comes and goes, and the artifact itself is forgotten. But, by contrast with the enormous apparatus of Google Calendar as a whole, the appointment is a relatively small thing. It is purpose-built, inasmuch as you hope having it in your digital calendar will help you make the appointment at some future moment. That record is an artifact, a remnant of your presence in this (digital) world. You make an appointment by typing or by speaking into your phone, and blammo, a digital record is created. The appointment you make in Google Calendar is also a purpose-built digital artifact, but in a different way. As a whole, Google Calendar exists to harvest user data efficiently in order to assist Google in making a profit. But the ends its makers seek to achieve are their own ends, not yours. As such, it is also structured to help you organize your life. To achieve that primary purpose, the digital artifact must be constructed in such a way as to persuade you to use it regularly - maybe even to replace your physical calendar. Its primary purpose is to harvest your data. But, in a sense, that purpose is secondary. If you are a user of Google Calendar, you know that the way this digital artifact is structured is meant to help you, the user, organize your life. Google Calendar can be understood as a purpose-built digital artifact because its makers are using its digital structures to achieve specific ends. Primarily, it uses your data to further its bottom line. It uses that data in a lot of different ways, perhaps most especially to help other people sell you things (and ideas and political preferences, etc.). Google collects extraordinary amounts of data ( here’s a breathtaking list from 2008: it’s so much more now, ten years later). Nice, right? But, it also exists to harvest your data - as much of it as possible, just like Facebook and every other “free” service provided on the internet. It exists, on the one hand, to help you organize your life. Google Calendar is purpose-built, for instance. Digital artifacts are purpose-built when they are meant to further somebody’s goals. The medium, the calendar itself, is one sort of digital artifact. And it is littered with further digital artifacts: your appointments (i.e., the record of all the intentions for ordering time and space that you set down, some of which you likely accomplished!). Your cell phone or email-linked calendar is a digital artifact in its own right. ![]()
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