Jump to content

Daily Me

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 64.12.117.6 (talk) at 21:56, 20 June 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Daily Me is a term coined by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte as a virtual daily newspaper customized for the individual tastes. Negroponte discusses it in his 1995 book, Being Digital. Fred Hapgood, in a 1995 article in Wired traces the concept and phrase back to Negroponte's thinking in the 1970s.

In Steven Johnson's book Emergence, Johnson addresses some of Negroponte's fears with homeostasis and feedback systems in mind. He argues that a newspaper tailored to the personal tastes of a person on a given day will lead to too much positive feedback in that direction, and a person's choices for one day would permanently affect their viewings for the rest of their life. Ironically, while this text reaches publication in 2001, since then many customer-oriented websites such as Amazon.com and Half.com regularly utilize a customer's past views and purchases to determine what merchandise they believe will entice the customer's interest.

The term has also been associated with the phenomenon of individuals customising and personalising their news feeds, resulting in their being exposed only to content they are already inclined to agree with. The daily me can thus be a critical component of the "Echo Chamber" effect, defined in an article in Salon by David Weinberger as "those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them."

Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, analyzes the implications of the Daily Me in his book, Republic.com.

See also