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The Personalisation of Information- A Dead End?

By Martin Oetting

Wherever we look, the freedom of choice seems to be the ruler of all. And that is especially true for information. We used to have a mere three or four TV stations to choose from, now anything under 30 is considered an outrage. We used to have only a few newspapers at the stands, now we can access any newspaper on the planet from our web browser. Radio used to be rather straightforward, but try to keep up on the thousands of stations that could be coming through to you on the net. At a first glance, it seems as if this proliferation of choice enables us to be the well-informed citizens that the web was meant to produce. We can learn all the latest news about whatever we want -- environmental trouble in Africa, municipal elections in Australia, a rape scandal in Japan or how the technical innovation changes the lives of fishermen in Finland. We CAN learn about all that. The question is: ARE we really? A very interesting article -- at

http://www.salon.com/tech/books/1999/11/09/control_revolution/index.html

with the title "The Internet Illusion" -- claims that, in fact, the opposite is happening. The following section is partially based on that article.

The Explosion of the Niches

I guess most know what niches are in marketing lingo: tiny segments of a market that have quite specific needs or tastes, which have to be catered to in very specific manners. A few years ago, niches - in, let's say, the car market -- could only be exploited by small companies that were capable of producing small quantities of very specialist cars at reasonable costs. But today, thanks to fierce competition and new technology, almost every car manufacturer has a sporty roadster in his range, a few years ago considered a genuine niche car. The same is happening with information. A while ago, information was aggregated by the large middlemen of the information monopolies: TV broadcasters, radio stations, national newspapers and news agencies. When you wanted news, you had to resort to the news they were offering, there was not much of a choice. The consequence was that you didn't always get news you were interested in, they poured out news over you that you wouldn't have watched if you'd had the choice. But you did watch it, waiting for things to come up that would be more interesting. So again, we had markets that did not respect niches.

Niches in the Information Age

These things have changed. With the proliferation of all news sources, every little niche gets catered to: MTV for those who want music news, VIVA for those who want specific German music news, Bloomberg TV for those who want business news, Cartoon network for those who don't want news but Bugs Bunny, etc. And TV is certainly at the back end of the niche competition. If we have one medium that caters to all the niches that you can and cannot imagine, it's the net. On the net, every possible niche can be spoken to: Star Trek fans can split up between Klingon followers and opposers, motorcycle enthusiasts will only deal with the very model that they love, music fans check out only the sites that deal with their very hero group. In a nutshell: You only see what you want to see. Now that may seem like the perfection in personalization. Everyone has absolute control over what he or she consumes.

A Limited Niche Leads to Limited Knowledge

There is just one concern: When we still had mass media to deal with -- with everyone getting the same news -- there was a common ground to start from. People had to share a not so precise but very broad knowledge of the world around them. Nowadays, everyone can pick their own little favorite bit of the news, without regard to what happens elsewhere. We may learn all we want to know about our favorite subject, but won't we start to know less and less about the things that may globally affect us?

I just wanted to throw this little thought at you. Do you believe that the internet helps us be better informed citizens who are able to make more well-informed choices about or lives? Or does it basically make us more limited and more restricted to a few things we are interested in? Does the Internet connect us? Or does it essentially get us disconnected from the many and connected to a limited few?

Pool, Winter 2000

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