Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for March 2006
Regular readers of these exquisitely honed little dollops of librariana will have long since worked out that I have an ego as big as all outdoors. Fear not, however. Despite the title, this column isn’t about me; it’s about you. Well, OK, it’s about both of us, and everybody else besides.
Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking about personalization and customization and the roles they play on the internet. There’s nothing really all that shocking or new about this; such things have been around for a long time and I imagine many of us use them in various ways and at various depths.
My school, the University of Washington, has a personalized portal service called MyUW, which has lots of options, and which I largely use to get my class lists and check on payroll stuff. I spend considerably more time with My Yahoo, which I use for news headlines and RSS feeds, blogs and podcasts, sports scores, weather, and so on. Libraries have developed similar services; I seem to recall North Carolina State University was among the first to come up with a “my library” feature. (By the way, check out their new catalog system; pretty spiffy.)
Me, me, me. . . . Lots of these services present themselves as “my” something or other. This month’s not-so-shocking revelation is that people, in general, are at the center of their information lives, and will easily and quickly adopt services that assist them in managing, organizing, controlling, and understanding those information lives, and by extension their lives in general.
For quite some time, we’ve heard concerns about overpersonalization—that people would get so stuck in their preferences and channels that they don’t see, hear, read, or experience alternative sources and points of view. If all your news comes from CNN (or Fox News or the BBC or the Orange County Register or the Onion or the Daily Show for that matter), the argument goes, that’s a bad thing somehow, cutting you off from the wider world.
Is it? Lots of people reading this probably think so, because we’re the kind of people who think multiple points of view are better (although I doubt we’ll see many pro-war sessions at the ALA Annual Conference this year, hmm?).
Let the record show, though, that often people only want or like single sources or things they agree with and that’s their business. The assumption that casting a wide net and getting broadly informed from multiple perspectives automatically or necessarily serves as a kind of daily intellectual bran muffin seems dicey at best. Breadth of intake doesn’t equate with breadth of thought or expression.
Extend these examples a bit, and consider services such as MySpace.com, Xanga, and Facebook. These allow people (not only teenagers, although you can be forgiven for thinking that) to share their pictures, blogs, ideas, thoughts, files, music, relationships, friendships, and so on with a global audience.
These aren’t, strictly speaking, examples of personalization, but rather the next generation of ways to more closely merge what we might loosely term “real life” with the digital domain—in this case moving beyond simply filtering or seeing what you want to see to reaching out and sharing important details of life with people with whom you share something, including people you would likely never otherwise find or know.
Finally, consider recommendation engines. The record there is spotty, at least in my anecdotal experience. Much as I love Netflix, it’s suggested some mighty peculiar DVDs for me, and Amazon seems helpless in the face of my myriad and occasionally bizarre reading tastes. Yet iTunes seems to have a much better handle on songs I want to spend 99 cents on. This can be tetchy business, too—witness what happened to Wal-Mart, whose system recommended Planet of the Apes to people who were buying DVDs about famous African Americans (human error, apparently), among other less-egregious blunders.
In an ever-increasingly complex world, with cable channels and radio stations and media outlets in the hundreds and thousands, not to mention the Web, it’s no wonder that people are looking for a little help and trying all kinds of strategies not to read or listen to things.
Customization, RSS feeds, recommendations, along with sharing services all provide that help, not only in finding your way but in finding your voice in the pandemonium that surrounds us all. Because for each of us, every once in a while, it really is about me . . . but that’s another story.