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profslevy.bsky.social
ProfSlevy
@profslevy.bsky.social
290 followers 140 following 22 posts
Teacher, baker, napper, reader.
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louiseseamster.bsky.social
imagine when all your qualtrics and Canvas interactions (yes also you, faculty) are merged with all your video game and social media activity

"“The secret to all of this was changing fundamentally how we thought about identity…” the cultural theorists will have a field day with this sentence
EA is best known for its football simulations, first-person shooters, and fantasy role-playing games, but more than any of EA’s wildly popular gaming franchises, Silver Lake and its co-investors likely covet its data-mining operations. Since 2013, EA has been building one of gaming’s largest and most advanced infrastructures for collecting, warehousing, and analyzing user data. “Once the game is installed on a user’s machine,” Bernard Marr writes in Big Data In Practice (2016), “be that a console, phone or PC, it can gather information about that device. If the user connects their social media accounts (to make it easier to play games with friends), it can learn everything they share on there.” EA holds on to enormous repositories of information about their customers, mined from device logs, as well as from financial micro-transactions, closed-circuit chatrooms and telecoms, and every aspect of gameplay itself, which in some cases can be personalized, micro-targeted, and/or customized by machine-learning.6 Most importantly, EA can quickly develop data profiles which follow gamers to whatever games they play and whichever devices they play on, potentially even beyond the EA ecosystem. As EA’s Global Chief Technology Officer, Rajat Taneja, puts it, “The secret to all of this was changing fundamentally how we thought about identity…capturing all of the events from their phone, from their console or PC, into a single persona - this allows all the data around them to be actioned properly.”
December 7, 2025 at 12:36 PM