I'm wrestling with the controversial idea that perhaps all this
personalization has a downside. Ten years ago, MIT's Nicholas Negroponte
theorized a newspaper that pulled together all the things you're
interested in and delivered it--"The Daily Me."

It's here now and it's not just alerts via up-to-the-minute blogs or
news-feeds. You've got Tivo for your shows, iPod for music you desire,
Netflix for movies you want, and Sirius (or XM) for the radio you want.
Empowering? Sure. But the downside seems to be isolation. All those
music listeners walking about NYC with dangling white headphones are
independent tribes of one, perhaps literally in an "I"-"Pod".

People who follow nanotechnology closely recognize that the most
dramatic changes will come at the boundaries (as all change does--whether
in population ecologies, nation-states or on-campus quads). The
biologist that bucks the border of his discipline is more likely to
stumble upon a breakthrough than his colleague who remains caged. But it
requires pressing up against the boundaries, not creating a bubble
around one's self. Perhaps the irony is this: many of our new
technologies with rapid adoption rates from network effects actually
make it easier to opt-out and isolate in personalized cocoons.

I for one like listening to the radio or watching live TV, knowing
there's a network of people listening or watching to the same thing I
am, having the same or opposite emotional response that I am, at the same
time. Sometimes popular TV shows aren't necessarily popular because they
are good. Sometimes they're popular because they're popular (Just as
people can be famous for being famous).

My last media quip for this week: the blockbuster movie business has
morphed into a late 90s investment bank, churning out low quality
offerings and relying on pre-marketing to pack them in and make their
money. Contrast Oscar-nominated Sideways with blockbuster-bomb Elektra.
Sideways opened on about 350 screens and took 10 weeks to gross about
$25 million. Elektra opened on 10x as many screens and grossed $25
million in 1/10th of the time. The logic for the studios has become
simple: spend big on advertising, then pack people in before they find
out it sucks. Many investment banks used the same strategy.

Here's my friendly reminder to disconnect next weekend. Take the weekend
and if you have spare time, maybe use it to read. As my childhood
friends twisted the old library slogan to make fun of me, "reading is
fun-for-mentals". Or as Voltaire said, "You despise books; you whose
lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure
or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only
savage nations, is governed by books."

(Josh Wolfe, NYC)
And
www.ForbesWolfe.com