• by Jim Meskauskas , April 15, 2004

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space a column titled "Content Control and the Rise of the Insular Man."

In that column, I argued that with the rising tide of media and the technology driving it, the individual's control over the choice he or she makes of what format and flavor of content to consume, might not be as "free" as media companies and the pundit class would have us believe.

The point I made then was that it appears as if, given our frenzied and harried lives, technology is being given the duty of making sense of the outside world and its many sources of output.

Personalization, once a plank in the Internet marketing platform (and still a stiff board with which one school of Internet marketers can swat the tails of another school of Internet marketers), is, in my view, another way where technology ostensibly frees us from slogging through the marshes of media possibilities but really only has us surrendering choice because we are too overwhelmed to deal with it.

A lot of technology in media really enables the individual's surrender of choice. We are either too busy (or too lazy) to ply a discerning mind to myriad media options and so consistently move further and further toward a state of monadal existence, living as simple, unextended substances with attenuated diversity in both exposure and consumption.

The fact that we desire to live in such a state is an important and worrisome commentary on the status of modernity. This is not to say that there is a conscious intent behind the technologies that do enable this, but it is worth being wary of the use it can be put to for that end. I will spare you all in what ways I think this bodes for marketing, society, and culture for now. But remember, the price of freedom is constant vigilance.

But something else worthy of note is that technology isn't on what we can finally rest all of our hopes for freedom from the drudgery of the ordinary misery of choice. The notion of personalization in Internet marketing is like the belief in the '50s that robots will be doing all of our work by 1999. Let's face it, for now, personalization and the technologies driving it are still far, far from being able to deliver on their own promise. Jim Sterne, an author and consultant, recently said, "Just tell me what on earth I was watching that made TiVo think I'd want to watch Mr. Chips Goes to Washington, The Fog of War, Catch Me If You Can, and a Three Stooges episode?

"Oh - the nightly news."

This humorous comment gets to the coeur du jour of the weakness of technology put to this kind of use.

Technology is typically very dumb. For the most part, it can only make linear decisions based on linear relationships. Data that can be placed to stand in relational quadrants certainly yield better "decisions," but it is still primarily based on the weight of ascribed values. It does not have "interpretative skills." John Searle, professor of the philosophy of language at the University of California-Berkeley and a developer of modern cognitive science, discusses something like this, albeit a bit unsophisticated by the standards of modern technology, when he talked about the limitations of Artificial Intelligence. He came up with what is now famously referred to as the "Chinese Box" experiment. Basically his argument demonstrates there is a difference between understanding and recognition. I can "teach" a machine to recognize symbols (like product orders of a category type) and respond to them by matching input symbols to a vast array of typical response output symbols such that it looks as if the machine "understands" what is being asked of it.

But it doesn't. It is just a pattern recognition device; it is not capable of understanding and interpreting data. This is the case with things like Amazon's or Netflix's recommendation engine. Or TiVo. Or any of the kinds of things that try to make us believe that media is being generated "just for us." It is still the case that only humans can turn data into information and information into knowledge. I've said on numerous occasions that it is pretty easy to predict what people in large groups are going to do or like or want; it is nearly impossible to guess what just ONE person is going to do or like or want.