I spent the last week away on the coasts of Mexico near Puerto Vallarta with my girlfriend Nicole. We spent time hiking, horseback riding through the rain forests, boating to isolated beaches, and exploring the local neighborhoods. I also got a chance to do some reading. One of the books I started reading during the tail end of the trip came through a recommendation from my friend R Why called Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein. R Why thought that I should give this a read because he wanted to balance my passion for the personalized internet and media experience with a well reasoned opinion on the side effects of the personalization of content.
While I have only started reading the book, Cass Sunstein raises some very good points. He states that a well functioning democratic system should 1) expose people to material they would not have otherwise chosen on their own, and 2) enable people to share some common experiences. He notes that without these, a democratic system will be tough to sustain because of the inability for different groups of likeminded people to understand and collaborate with one another. His thesis centers around the notion that various filtering and targeting technologies have "the consequence to encourage people to narrow their horizons, or to cater to their existing tastes rather than to allow them to form new ones." The natural result will be a slow decline of common experiences amongst people who share different tastes.
So far, I agree with Sunstein that collaborative filtering, contextual advertising, and other such technologies do have the negative side effect of minimizing exposure to content and advertising that may otherwise have enlightened us to see an issue in a different light or to appreciate a perspective which we did not previously understand. While I am a staunch promoter of personalization technology to limit the noise that comes our way, I think continuing to consume media which we would not have otherwise chosen is important for our democratic system. We cannot solve today's problems with blinders and seeing media that people different from us consume is important for shaping our opinions. How can such information be best delivered to consumers of media is the question. How can we give consumers the media they know they want and also serve up the media they may not otherwise have chosen in an engaging way?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
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2 comments:
"Common Experience" when it comes to media does, indeed, seem to be a dying concept. Giving people things they didn't know they wanted will remain -- we will still turn to various outlets we trust to "program" for us, though those channels will be increasingly numerous in selection and narrow in scope. As someone knee-deep in content discovery experiences I can say it's an exciting time to be thinking about these things....
It's good to think about the impact of the internetz and tech in general on democracy and politics, and Sunstein does that, at least. For example, one of the big debates in political science is the extent to which blogs polarize the electorate vs. creating greater opportunities for deliberation between opposed points of view. Sunstein's very worried about the cocooning effect that blogs and other super-personalized technologies can have, as you mention - but I think he's over the top in his concern.
A good way to think about it is that personalized media and the internetz are probably good for politics, but bad for democracy - that is, it does get people interested in and fired up on participating in politics, and when they do, they do so within a cocooned setting that amplifies their original position; but this is less beneficial for democracy and deliberation than, say, sitting around on the bench outside the local general store and discussing politics with your neighbors. The question is how good this tradeoff is (more partisan politics, but less democracy) - given how badly democratic participation has deteriorated in the US, I actually don't think it's a disaster.
Also, @ nathan d, I'm agreed that "giving people things they didn't know they wanted" will continue, even in a hyper-personalized media content world. And the reason is something that market logic has never wanted to recognize theoretically (though obviously anyone who's ever worked in marketing a product knows this to be true) - people preferences in making consumption choices are not innate desires or wants that just have to be activated, but they have to be manufactured or synthesized. That'll be true even in the most personalized of worlds - the personal can continually be made and remade by content providers.
And so when it comes to Sunstein's idea that we're losing common experiences, that may be true at the level of content, but not at the level of medium - and depending on how you feel about Marshall McLuhan's famous "the medium is the message," I think in spite of personalization/polarization in content, we do share in a common experience of Online Life, or Wired Life, and this creates more bonds than Sunstein might think (a TV Nation? One Nation, Wired Up, with Liberty and Justice?). Sunstein's argument wrongly treats technology itself as a neutral thing, worrying instead about the content - but the technology itself is, for better and worse, a form of social experience too, a form of content itself if you like... Just like people who, on a full-time basis, watch TV, read books, interpret tea leaves, or read natural signals (farmers or hunters) will all have more in common with others who do the same thing than with others who use different media, even in the same country or city.
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