Are you what you search?

Based on an incident in 2006 where the search queries of AOL users were leaked, User 927 is a play written by Katharine Clark Gray, a local playwright who I had the opportunity of meeting and working with very briefly this past summer. A lot of her writing relates to living in a world very much influenced by technology and deals with memory and disconnect (including Two Front Teeth, the play of hers that I became familiar with this summer). I came across this play and the ambient information actually looking for an excerpt from Two Front Teeth on memory and found myself down this rabbit hole instead. The NY Times article about Thelma Arnold is very interesting though and the actual search history of User 927 was too weird and disturbing for me to keep to myself. If you are interested in it as a track of someone's train of consciousness, it's certainly baffling, but the last link is fairly disturbing, so please pursue it at your own discretion.


On Katharine Clark Gray's User 927:

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/technology_internetcritic/2008/06/user-927-play-b.html



For more on the AOL incident:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

 

On the incident and Thelma Arnold, one of the individuals identified through her search queries:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

A link to User 927's search history can be found here (WARNING, what is listed are the keywords used for the searches and many of these searches are disturbing and potentially triggering as they contain material related to rape, child pornography, and incest among others):

http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-user-927s-entire-sordid-search-log