Based on previous choices

It’s important to know your history, so I decided to get myself a quick sum up of the early IT boom. I downloaded the podcast “The IT-bubble” from the Swedish radio and I’m just halfway through.

Anyhow, the podcast is all about the mid 90’s and the involved investors and developers huge future vision of how the internet would change the world and how all accessable information available to the citizens would democratize it. 

    I remember my first years of internet. The excited experience of exploring the www-world, meetings with randomly selected people and stumbling upon wacky and foreign websites. To surf the web was equally as exciting as travelling the world. 

That sort of excitement is still a part of me and explains why I’m devoting all my time to work with it.

It also explains why I feel so reluctant to the word “personalization”. In a big part of the applications and services we are producing at school, the word personalization almost always, comes up. 

You get your news feed shaped from where you live or what friends you’ve been adding on Twitter. The best Youtube clips to suit your taste based on previous views. The books you might be interested in according to what you’ve been buying before. The restaurants you should check out because you are a huge fan of thai food.

But I don’t want my information to personalized. I want to explore. I don’t want to frame my world and recieve filtered information based on my preferences in music, taste in food or the state of my finances. I don’t want my local grocery store to offer me a better price on the bread that I’m already buying. I’m not interested in the “similar artists” of the ones I already listen to. I’d like to try something new, thank you.

If you ever studied media historia, you are likely to know McQuail. His book “Mass Communication Theory” is often the core of the literature line up at media classes in Swedish universities. So I had a copy of the book in my bookshelf and looked up “framing”. Here it goes (2005 edition): 

Framing: A term with two main meanings. One refers to the way in which news content is typically shaped and contextualized by journalists within some familiar frame of reference and according to some latent structure of meaning. A second, related meaning concerns the effect on framing on the public. The audience is thought to adopt the frames of reference offered by the journalists and to see the world in a similar way. This process is related to priming and agenda-setting.

So sure, we are already “framed” by a lot of decisions taken by politicians, CEO:s, journalists and developers and who knows. But what concerns me, is when we decide to take it to the next step, all by ourselves.  

Our internet is becoming one of those places when everything looks the same even at the 34:th time we pop in. Like your childhood home. The sofa is still in it’s old place. The smell of coffe in the kitchen. Nothing’s changed. And that prime idea of internet that the IT-people in the 90’s stand for becomes long gone.

That’s not a place I would like to take part in. So from now on: No more personalizations. Just a big ass randomizer application.

good night