I read Yaa Addae’s Digital Doulas Take Restorative Justice to Cyberspace in addition to Joanne McNeil’s Search and Destroy.
Search and Destroy was a very enlightening read for me. As someone who grew up in the Internet age, I’m well informed with arguments on how huge corporate social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are harmful, but Google never really crossed my mind to be up there too. While I was wary of it as a large billion dollar corporation that also steals my information, it always seemed slightly less harmful than the other ones listed.
Instagram, for example, pushes personalized advertisements to me every day to get me to buy yet another product or service every 20 seconds. Tiktok does the same thing and also curates every piece of media I watch to keep me in an echo chamber of personally agreeable content. Instagram and Tiktok would also fall under the “unnecessary” category for many people; the average person uses them for entertainment, but would in no way consider it essential (aside from maybe messaging friends, but if that’s a person’s only use, they normally gravitate towards platforms such as iMessage or Messenger instead).
But as McNeil discusses in the article, Google is considered essential— “‘search’—once a word that signified quest, yearning—is now synonymous with ‘googling’”. It also doesn’t control what I see as explicitly as Tiktok or Instagram do, but in the end, it still does. In a way, this makes Google worse than all the other platforms. It’s silent. It takes our data and information seamlessly, while presenting a friendly and trustworthy image so we don’t suspect anything or care to investigate it further.
That’s where Yaa Adae’s idea of digital doulas becomes useful. It asks us to consider how we can reconcile our Internet usage with self-protection and use technology and data in a healing way. There’s no way to get rid of the Internet, and it’s essential to almost everyone in the world in this age. How can we recognize the emotional toll of being online and surveilled, and cope with that while still using the surveilling technology?