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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1998 Have I got news for me? A RECENT tragic accident dominated all newspapers, magazines, radio, TV broadcasts for well over a week. A single death invoked total news chaos in one country and more or less dominated the world news. At the extreme of the reporting frenzy one American TV presenter was heard to say: "We are probably witnessing the single biggest tragedy of the 20th Century." What? A tragic loss of life, yes, but what about the countless thousands of people who died unnoticed during the same period, or in the many wars of the past decade alone? What is happening, and why this extraordinary focus? It seems that the media and the populations they influence are now well into an all-or-nothing world of strange, and very strange, attractors that chaotically pull the attention of the majority on to one topic. Single-issue politics has been overtaken by single-issue news; the passive following of a pre-selected and prepared daily raft of information. But no one seems to worry, and most do not seem to notice this global and singular bit feed tempered by copy sales and audience ratings. In contrast, many people are apparently worried about the evils of the Internet. Is this rational? Could it possibly be worse? News is now big business. If there is no news, then it has to be found or manufactured, and it has to be fun, sensational or shocking. In a sensible world news would be of variable length and graded by importance, and ultimately focused to the needs and interests of individuals - you and me. But broadcast radio and TV and newspapers cannot do this. Only computer-driven services have the ability to create "The Daily Me". What I would give to be free of all the radio, TV and print news feeds that are so inefficient at delivering the very few bytes of interest, relevance, and use to me? Instead of wasting hours viewing, listening, and rummaging through the unwanted remains of some forest in what seems to be an increasingly vain expectation of finding something of real importance, I desire a truly personal bit feed. Push technologies and their derivatives give us the first glimmer of hope that a future of "The Daily Me" may just be possible. Electronic agents that roam the global network on our behalf looking for information that we would each appreciate on an individual basis are now almost with us. In this regime the news can be customised by individuals rather than organisations. So we will individually control and dictate what qualifies as news for us, we will judge the relevance. One interesting possibility is people being categorised by interests and responses to news and information feeds selected. Suppose you and I have similar interests and we independently register a series of requests and respond favourably to a given number of news items. It would be simple to identify a 70 per cent correlation with others to form a given interest group. Then things I had accessed and you hadn't would constitute a likely favourable offering and vice versa. Just add a smidgen of serendipity, or directed randomness, and bingo, we can all have just the bits we need, no more, no less. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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