Adentity

By Luiz Carlos De Souza Junior

Topic: Digital Traces

Medium: Poster

Institute: Politecnico di Milano

Year: a.a. 2023-2024

Whether I’m working, studying or just chilling it’s almost guaranteed I’m gonna have a YouTube video or playlist both for watching actively or for listening in the background while I do other stuff. Given this constant use of the platform, YT’s algorithm has a very good idea of what I like and dislike. So the ads YT shows me are the ones that it judges I should be the most interested in. This “Adentity” (Ad Identity) is how youtube sees me, is my Digital Double inside YT’s database. If these ads represent how YT sees me, I chose to represent that in a literal way by creating a portrait of me made up by a mosaic of the thumbnails of these ads.

Complementary image of the project Adentity

Metaphor used:

“I am my ads” is the chosen metaphor that is represented by the substitution of the pixels of my close-up portrait by thumbnails of the ads I’ve consumed.

Intended Meaning:

Google and other big tech companies want us to consume more ads and give up more personal information, so that they can serve us even more ads. They don’t see us as customers or even users, we are the product to be sold to advertisers. So to Google, our identity revolves around value and our value is defined by the ads we’ve consumed and our potential to consume more ads. Therefore, the intention in this representation is to represent in “How Youtube and Google sees us”, that is as a sum of all the ads we’ve seen (and will see).

Source:

Ads personally seen on YouTube since 2021: 49.300 videos, 8679 ads (18% of the videos consumed were ads).