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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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