Pointing at the mushrooms - Identifying our own digital colonisation
Far and away the most popular misconception I have heard about the way digital advertising works is that our phones listen to us and create tailored advertising based on this. It is a very accessible point of conversation for people who maybe don't know the workings of the mechanisms that make their technology work but can use pattern recognition to identify their interests being presented back to them on their devices.
The classic story is always that someone was having a conversation with a friend (That was just incredibly specific and unrelated to what we would normally talk about) and then shortly after that the person received adverts that were tailored around the subject of conversation so specifically that the only logical conclusion is that the phone was listening to their conversation.
While social media is objectively consuming your usage data to produce tailored advertisements - up to and including your message content, what you're viewing, how you scroll, and who you're talking to, it is not recording your voice in the background.
Aside from being an incredibly resource-intensive and impractical way to gather data that would be mostly pocket-noise, any recordings taken would be an observable action taken by software on your phone. Applications like facebook and instagram are constantly being researched and probed by security conscious researchers and hobbyists who are working to identify new ways that the social media giants are recording data on us. General audio recordings on your phone that capture conversation are not on these lists.
What then is happening? The answer is very much explainable by taking a left turn to talk about mycelium and mushrooms for a moment. Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a network of thread-like structures called hyphae. When a spore lands on a suitable 'substrate' they germinate and produce hyphae to 'colonise the substrate'. This is where the hyphae consume the organic matter it's attached to until the nutrient levels are completely depleted and the host is 'saturated' with the hyphae and mycelium. Once the substrate has been entirely drained of resources the fruiting body of the mycelium will form. The caps and stems we recognise as mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of these networks.
The final and triumphant mushroom is our evidence that the substrate it sits in has been fully consumed by the underground mycelium. The mushroom is the output of an invisible process.
Similarly, when we suggest that our phone 'has to be listening to us' to know our interests so well, we are only pointing at the mushroom. We have successfully identified the fruiting body of our total digital colonisation - but do not yet understand that the mycelium has taken root. We are the substrate and the fungus has successfully mapped and identified us, creating an accurate data profile.
This data profile (devastatingly) is sophisticated enough to begin predicting the conversations we may have, and who we may be having them with. Pointing at these adverts and suggesting that the phones are recording us is akin to pointing at a mushroom and suggesting we save the substrate. The substrate has been consumed, you are only observing the outcome.
People (myself included) have a tendency to think they are exempt from the workings of the machine, and that we are engaging sustainably with social media at a healthy distance. Sudden and unexpected accuracy of targeted advertising is a jarring reminder that this simply isn't true. The moment of bafflement we experience when we look down and see such a precise marketisation of our own interests should always serve as a warning; We are the substrate! We have been successfully digitally colonised, the mushroom has bloomed.
It would be so much less worrisome if social media privacy abuse was as simple as recording you and spitting adverts back at you, but it is far more sophisticated and resource efficient than that. We are correct to assume that our phones 'observe us'. It's not using the microphone though, it's certainly not 'interacting' with you, it's just accepting everything that you're offering up to it.
This observation is not a dialogic process, and not one that mimics a human conversation: you are simply being consumed. If you find that uncomfortable then you need to stop feeding the fungus.