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The ability to tailor-make news and advertisments is nothing new, and the kind of thing that the makers are talking about is sharply double-edged, but there's another dimension to it.
With such a tightly-tailored information stream, your preferences have to be known. How long before your credit ratings, social details, indeed the many things that one holds private are available <I> on demand </I> to those that control the filters? The more you give up in terms of privacy, it seems the more you get in terms of exposure to tailored news sources. It's happening right now. Signup for any major news service and they'll want things like your telephone number, maybe even your street address. They aren't compulsory fields - for now.
The other issue is one of "media creep". As the presentation shows - and is already being proved correct - mass media, made for the masses by a cunning media presence who feed off basic, egocentric, reactionary public opinion, will eventually become so distorted in the name of public opinion and interests that news itself will become what people want to hear. Look at Fox News in the US. In-depth analysis? Don't make me laugh. Look at The Sun and the red-banner press in the UK - alarmist, shallow and pandering to our most basic urges - sex, fear and social cohesion in the form of popular sports. Media creep will become so incredibly amplified that voices of reason and intelligence - not knowledge, intelligence - in this new sea of editors risk being lost. But it's been happening, is happening and will continue happening on an exponential scale. And what of our ability to cross-reference? As a student of International Relations I now cross-reference news stories in order to obtain the most accurate picture of events possible. What happens to that ability once something like EPIC goes on-line? The competition is forced out, we lose our other sources... popular opinion in the form of billions of editors prevails, the majority view is applied to the facts of any reported case and suddenly you have the perfect tool for disseminating any message you want provided the populous can be made to believe it. Events are watched 24-hours a day with no chance for independent analysis and majority views and values are impressed upon most readers - Mill's Tyranny Of The Majority finally comes viciously into effect. The elite, now riding a populist machine, have no alternative but to hang on. Press and public enter a perpetual feedback loop of information with no way out. Each affects the other.
1984, anyone?
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Furry is the leader of his own cult, the "Furballs of Doom". They sit about chanting "Doom, Doom, Doom".
(From a random shot in the dark by SirLance)
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