{"id":17972,"date":"2014-02-03T06:00:04","date_gmt":"2014-02-03T10:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17972"},"modified":"2014-02-02T17:57:41","modified_gmt":"2014-02-02T21:57:41","slug":"sniffing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/02\/03\/sniffing\/","title":{"rendered":"Sniffing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo<\/a><\/p>\n

I walk my two dogs, Laika and Sputnik, once or sometimes twice a day. On these walks, they sniff around a lot. One day, while they were on a particularly strong sniff binge, I wondered how their olfactory interaction with the physical world translated into a metaphysics, specifically, into an understanding of time. Sputnik and Laika could smell this patch of sidewalk\u2019s recent past–they knew that my neighbor Mickey and her dogs Bentley and Beauty had taken a walk earlier this afternoon (I\u2019m guessing this was the case because they go nuts for their scent, as Mickey always gives them treats). That\u2019s not something I would know unless I (a) talked to Mickey, or (b) had surveillance camera data from the car dealership by this particular patch of sidewalk. What, for me, was an imperceptible, unknowable \u201cpast\u201d was for them a perfectly accessible fact. The past was physically present for them in a way it was not for me. Surely this different perceptual orientation to the physical world translates into a different metaphysical experience of time and, well, of reality more generally. When the world is sniffed rather than seen, different features and patterns of relationships emerge as the prominent, organizing factors of that world.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t particularly interested in following up on that idea until I read that<\/a> \u201csniffing\u201d is a metaphor commonly used to describe a specific type of data surveillance.<\/p>\n

\n

…Dataium software used a controversial technique to attempt to determine whether a visitor had been to nearly 100 other sites, including edmunds.com, bmw.com, usatoday.com, google.com, and linkedin.com. Known as \u201cCSS history sniffing\u201d, this technique exploits a security vulnerability in older Web browsers, such as Internet Explorer 8. Modern browsers have plugged this privacy hole. Dataium CEO Eric Brown told the Journal it has used the technique intermittently for testing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This sensory metaphor seems really appropriate: in the same way that my dogs can reach into the recent past and \u201csniff out\u201d who\u2019s been peeing on their telephone pole, this Dataium software can reach into my browser\u2019s recent past and \u201csniff out\u201d the sites I\u2019ve been clicking on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that data sniffing is considered manifestly \u201cunscrupulous behavior,\u201d as the article puts it. I think I suggests how strongly our notions of privacy and propriety are shaped by the sense of sight and vision, that is, by a very specific sensory orientation to the world. Technology often augments our senses. My eyeglasses, for example, augment my naturally pretty crappy vision, just as telescopes augment even great eyes to superhuman strength.<\/p>\n

Often, physiological and technological limits function as de facto ethical limits. It\u2019s impolite, and, indeed, illegal, to watch what people do behind the solid, opaque walls of their homes, for example. The limits of conventional human sight are ensconced in US privacy law. When physiological and technological limits are overcome, we need to make explicit ethical rules to govern behavior that used to be physiologically and technologically impossible. \u00a0Data \u201csniffing\u201d augments \u201csenses\u201d that have generally been of little explicit ethical import. In Western culture and philosophy, smell generally isn\u2019t thought to bring us epistemologically significant information. Sure, it helps us tell if the milk is bad, but this sort of practical information isn\u2019t as culturally\/epistemologically privileged as \u201ctheoretical\u201d or \u201cscientific\u201d information, on the one hand, or political representation (\u201cspeech\u201d) on the other. Or, to be more technical, smell, unlike either visual or auditory communication (writing and speech), does not take propositional form or carry propositional content.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, \u201csniffing\u201d was not a way to gain epistemologically, culturally, or politically relevant information–at least, not for humans. Now technology has augmented our ability to \u201csniff\u201d–i.e., to perceive the past in ways previously unavailable to typical human sense perception, and perhaps manifestly typical\u201csniffing\u201d behaviors feel creepy and unscrupulous because they ask us to comport ourselves to the world in ways that feel, well, unhuman. I doubt my dogs would feel creeped out that some other dog sniffed their pee on the local telephone pole (I mean, they\u2019re counting on it–that\u2019s why they mark the pole in the first place). Sputnik and Laika are used to leaving scents and having those scents sniffed, so they behave accordingly. Perhaps we\u2019re just not used to thinking about and being accountable for the scents, both literal and figurative, that we leave around. What if learning to live in the world of big data and \u201chistory sniffing\u201d means learning to relate to our bodies, our senses, and our world in different metaphysical terms (like how my dogs may have a different intuitive metaphysics than I have)? Perhaps before we think about the ethics of these technological advancements, we need to reconsider our metaphysical assumptions?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I walk my two dogs, Laika and Sputnik, once or sometimes twice a day. On these walks, they sniff around a lot. One day, while they were on a particularly strong sniff binge, I wondered how their olfactory interaction with the physical world translated into a metaphysics, specifically, into an understanding of time. Sputnik and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[36425,26554,39,26553,26552],"class_list":["post-17972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-data","tag-dogs","tag-ethics","tag-metaphysics","tag-sniffing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17972"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17975,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17972\/revisions\/17975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}