Recently someone hacked into the database at UCLA and stole personal identity information for potential identity theft. While it scares me in the first place to have my credit card and social security information in databases and on the internet, I recently had an unsettling experience concerning databases and the internet. I got a letter in the mail from this online company that I had bought something from online. Apparently someone breached the security of their online database and stole thousands of names, addresses and their corresponding credit card information. Mine was a part of this database so they told me to check over all my credit card statements, inform my credit card company and accept their apology. While I don't know much about hacking or really even computers in general, I was pissed at this company for not taking the proper security measures to protect their databases and their customers.

The database logic is very relevant to my thesis topic of the digital biography. I discuss the two main benefits of this new biography as being all of the multimedia content it can hold, as well as its ability to let users decide how they experience the biographically presented life. Manovich acknowledges this new format: “Another example of a database form is a multimedia genre that does not have an equivalent in traditional media—CD-ROMs devoted to a single cultural figure such as a famous architect, film director, or write. Instead of a narrative biography, we are presented with a database of images, sound recordings, video clips, and/or texts that can be navigated in a variety of ways” (220). He later says that the Internet holds this same function (220). I feel affirmed that he agrees with me that the digital biography is fundamentally something new.

“Indeed, if after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of Grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database” (219).