Like many people, I trust Google to find me answers to everything from the mundane to the medical. Now, after a decade in which our increasing obsession with social media brought our computers out of the study and into the living-room, more of us are turning to the internet even when our question is emotional or irrational. The result: two decades after the birth of the web, our search histories have become a mirror to every aspect of our lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone once said that what you look for is way more telling than information about yourself \u201d\u201c this is something Google and other search engines understood a long time ago,\u201d\u009d says Luciano Floridi, the Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute.<\/p>\n
\u201cFuture generations will be able to trace our interests as a society just by looking at what we were looking for. Even if we don\u2019t find the information, it doesn\u2019t matter. Who we are, how we represent ourselves, how the world feeding back a mirror image of ourselves shapes our idea of ourselves \u201d\u201c this is as old as philosophy, but today has a completely new twist. The online and offline are becoming more and more blurred, and that feeds back into our self-perception.\u201d\u009d (If that sounds pseudy, then think of the example of a recruiter Googling someone who\u2019s applied for a job: does the person on Twitter better represent who they really are, or the person on their best behaviour in the interview room?)<\/p>\n