Before I begin I need to describe an anxiety. I think this anxiety makes sense of much else that I wish to say.
At its most raw the anxiety is that of being reduced to a number. This does deliberately have 2nd World War connotations.
A person who is a number is someone who can be done with as someone else or some others determine should be the fate of a number in the context of other numbers. I will not repeat the 2nd World War scenario.
I have found that my original interest in computing on the occurrence of words in documents, of information extraction with respect to text, is qualitatively different to using the same or similar techniques with information about people. This qualitative shift will be a recurrent theme I explore.
The anxiety is about a sense of a loss of self along with the knowledge that other selves are represented by manipulable data items (numbers in some context).
That is a large or vastly large number of people, otherwise entirely unknown to me, are having some aspect of what is known about them in the (database backed) system act as a trigger to how the system reacts to them.
The first point of anxiety for me is the large number of people this might entail.
There is a tension between the irrational and the plausibly rational here.
A fear of loss of self is not unknown to me and the first point of anxiety is only a trigger. My thinking is that I, too, could be one of those people captured on the system, that there is nothing that holds me apart from them.
As this is already irrational, let me dig a bit deeper.
A question is what difference would 4, 40 or 400 million people make, and the true, rational answer is none apart from that 400 million people would represent a huge data load to be responsible for.
There is, in other words, anxiety attached to the scale of the system, for instance the ramifications of even a small error would ripple out across a huge data set.
It is rational to worry about unforeseen consequences in this situation.
Now what is happening here is that the attempt to understand the system becomes all important, the degree to which it is understood and, hence, under control, and the extent to which the I as the putative person responsible, is absorbed by this task reflects in a loss of a sense of self. If my task is work for an employer their interest is decidedly not in me or my well being, or any conflict that being absorbed in work for them conflicts with holding on to a sense of myself.
I have no doubt that my feelings are like a high contrast photo, one that I am in a peculiar position to take. I assume that others would more naturally fit into role. I have said no more that one sort of person is not suitable for the tasks of another sort of person.
There remains something else I make of this.
See also Category: Information [1]: http://conjoint.biz/information