You might be willing to pay the Boston Globe a lot more for ten pages than for a hundred pages, if you could be confident that it was delivering you the right subset of information. You would consume every bit (so to speak). Call it The Daily Me. On Sunday afternoon, however, we may wish to experience the news with much more serendipity, learning about the things we never knew we were interested in, being challenged by a crossword puzzle, having a good laugh with Art Buchwald, and finding bargains in the ads. This is The Daily Us … These are not two distinct states of being, black and white. We tend to move between them, and, depending on our mood, we will want lesser or greater degrees of personalization. Imagine a computer display of news stories with a knob that, like a volume control, allows you to crank personalization up or down.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In his 1995 book “Being Digital,” Nicholas Negroponte writes:”What if a newspaper company were willing to put its entire staff at your beck and call for one edition? It would mix headline news with ‘less important’ stories relating to acquaintances, people you will see tomorrow, and places you are about to go or have just come from. It would report on companies you know. In fact, under these conditions, you might be willing to pay the Boston Globe a lot more for ten pages than for a hundred pages, if you could be confident that it was delivering you the right subset of information. You would consume every bit (so to speak). Call it The Daily Me. On Sunday afternoon, however, we may wish to experience the news with much more serendipity, learning about the things we never knew we were interested in, being challenged by a crossword puzzle, having a good laugh with Art Buchwald, and finding bargains in the ads. This is The Daily Us … These are not two distinct states of being, black and white. We tend to move between them, and, depending on our mood, we will want lesser or greater degrees of personalization. Imagine a computer display of news stories with a knob that, like a volume control, allows you to crank personalization up or down. You could have many of these controls, including a slider that moves both literally and politically from left to right to modify stories about public affairs. These controls change your window onto the news, both in terms of its size and its editorial tone. In the distant future, interface agents will read, listen to, and look at each story in its entirety. In the near future, the filtering process will happen by using headers, those bits about bits.”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: February 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Newspapers
Name of publication: Being Digital (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 12: Less Is More
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 153, 154
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne