
Click on or type: http://personas.media.mit.edu/ in your favorite browser.
Change your screen resolution to 800×600 (just for a minute…), select full screen (F11) for your browser window…
…Enter your first name and last name, press enter and ENJOY!
…I mean watch…your “persona” or authoritative profile building itself from the million entries corresponding to your query items which are already existing on the Internet!
Here is how the Sociable Media Group from the MIT lab who is conducting this project describes their Personas tool’s process:
“Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.”
Watching the online app processing (i.e.; scouring and categorizing in real time!) is quite impressive…but I recommend you try out different spellings for your names: with and without capitals since it yields varying results depending on your entries…
It is tempting to play around with the tool since the displayed processing and result are a bit fascinating, but as we are ‘bathing’ in the hyped times of the so-called ’social web’, I ask you please, not to forget to read and reflect upon the philosophy and idea behind this project as the MIT Lab SMG states it:
“It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.”
Enjoy!