Increasingly, our gadgets have started profiling us. Books or brands we have shown an interest seem to follow us around the Internet whichever site we might be on and our mobile phones seem to know where we go usually and how much time it takes to get there. It is a subtle kind of magic on most occasions, although sometimes one gets the feeling of being stalked by one’s own former desires.

Part of the miracle of the internet is that it is increasingly becoming a more intelligent organism that is customising itself to our needs. The technologies of the pre-digital were centred largely around the body and tried hard to overcome the many constraints of the human body, by allowing us to act beyond its capacities. But in doing so, machines imposed a certain framework of its own— we had to learn to use these, for they worked in fixed ways. We had to adapt our lives to their functions; our abilities increased dramatically but in every case, it was the machine that determined what we could do or could not do. What the internet does is to put us at the centre of our own universe. The starting point is what we want. On a search engine, we merely say the word and a universe of options is presented before us.

Part of the effort to wrap a universe around individual desires is to figure out an individual’s particular set of needs and cater to these as well as possible. Algorithms work hard at correlating an individual’s behaviour on the web from across sites, and fashioning it in a way that serves her better. The market has a vested interest in knowing what we want, and it creates a strong incentive for the search for information on what it sees as ‘consumer’ behaviour. Our interests, opinions, fantasies and whimsies become part of a growing body of coherent knowledge available to the market for a price. The result is that no matter where we go, or what we seek, we find the same ads following us, and the same whispered blandishments of things that we allegedly like or want because we happened to search for something related at one time in our life.

Till recently advertising had to make to do with imperfect knowledge. It tried to arrive at an approximate understanding of who its consumer was and what she wanted. The content that it was part of too tried to cater to its audience but without a great understanding of what it really wanted to read about or watch. To be sure, market research helped them in their efforts but it only provided aggregate data of a crude kind. In any case, traditionally, media content was the preserve of journalists that kept that the need of the advertisers at a disdain’s distance away. Increasingly, as the market has taken a place of pride in our lives, media content is being driven by what the audience wants. We get to see and hear what we want to. Popular channels whittle down what they cover to what people like to see. They feature news about a few, for a few. On social media, we follow those whose views we agree with and operate as a collective on issues of concern.

The arrival of the intelligent Internet is pushing this phenomenon of a world shrunk to fit into our imagination much harder. Now, the mechanism for understanding of behaviour has moved from the unit of a collective group to that of an individual. What is more, the individual is understood as a sum of her actions, with detailed knowledge about every bit of desire that is displayed on the internet.

Apart from issues of privacy that have been extensively documented by many, this raises a fundamental question. Can we escape ourselves, or versions of ourselves— echoes distorted through the corridors of commerce, shreds of desires that come back to haunt us forever? The question goes beyond the specifics of a search engine or a social media site, and becomes a deeper one. If we construct the world around the individual, are we merely constructing an elaborate hall of mirrors? We may get access to whatever we want, but how do we want things in the first place if we cannot reach beyond who we are? Being catered to slavishly increases choice but reduces imagination. It also polarises the world as early prejudices harden into a crystallised sense of self which then gets repeatedly validated as a result of an intelligent media system that refuses to challenge us. We are sold images of ourselves and given membership to clubs that are like-minded. Everywhere we go virtually, we get reinforcement for who we are and a seeming array of choices created specifically for us with of the foreknowledge of what we like.

When the individual had to be rescued from under the crushing weight of the collective, then the deification of individual desire made a lot of sense. But when the world is dominated by the individual, the question of what goes into the making of an individual becomes critical. In some senses, the individual became one by being subjected to things he did not like or desire. As education becomes more student-centric, and media more audience-centric, and science more user-centric, is there place of the truly new idea? Fetishising the individual has costs, the principal among them being the shuttering of the imagination. There is no question that the world of digital technology has opened up our world in a dazzling new way but there are underlying movements that might make this openness more illusory than real. We need to take care lest what we thought was a window to the world ends being a mere mirror to our inflated sense of self.