Information, by its nature, is always customized and tailored to some degree … But … micro-customization would strip newspapers and other documents of one of their primary strengths: helping bestow a sense of community on a group … Newspapers and magazines are an important way a community discovers and builds on its sense of shared concern … It establishes a baseline of expectations about what we, as a community, are all supposed to know … The act of publishing – which, at its root, means “making public” – helps to establish a public in the first place … We begin to lose that sense of community when what once were shared public expressions are tailored by computers to the needs and desires of individuals.
Predictor: Weinberger, David
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 essay for Wired magazine, David Weinberger, president of Evident Marketing, Brookline, Massachusetts, writes: ”Information, by its nature, is always customized and tailored to some degree. For example, The New York Times is tailored to one set of interests while the Wall Street Journal is tailored to another. The logical extension of this observation ought to be that each person would be best served by a newspaper customized for his or her interests. But such micro-customization would strip newspapers and other documents of one of their primary strengths: helping bestow a sense of community on a group. After all, one of the reasons we read a newspaper is to see what is being said. The fact that an article appears on page 15 instead of page 1 tells us something about how a community (or at least its newspaper) is evaluating the importance of the article. If I were to instruct my computerized personal newspaper service that my main interest was stories about Malaysia, the front page of my personalized periodical would be filled with them, and I would at once lose an important gauge of how my community judges the significance of that country. Publications such as newspapers and magazines, then, are an important way a community discovers and builds on its sense of shared concern. The fact that the document I’m looking at is the same for all who receive it has other important effects. It establishes a baseline of expectations about what we, as a community, are all supposed to know. If, at the height of the Persian Gulf War, we encountered an American who said he or she had never heard of Desert Storm, we would have learned something important about that person. In short, the act of publishing – which, at its root, means ‘making public’ – helps to establish a public in the first place. A public, a community, is pulled together to a great extent by what it is expected to know, and how it evaluates the significance of current events. We begin to lose that sense of community when what once were shared public expressions are tailored by computers to the needs and desires of individuals.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Newspapers
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Daily Me? No, the Daily Us
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/weinberger.if_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney