You are saving time by getting only what you want, when you want it, while
your hands make toast. To learn more about the stock market crash in Tokyo, you call up the Internet, cruising the computers and videoservers of the world, to gather items from C-SPAN, NHK, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Le Monde, Reuters, and countless digital databases and videofiles.
You stay with a developing issue as long as your interest, money, and time
permit. Some of the information comes free as part of your monthly cable or
online service, some is subsidized by imbedded advertising, and some requires
an access or per-minute-of-usage charge. If you don't like advertising, you can
pay more to get ad-free material. If you don't mind getting information that's
not so fresh, you can pay less.
You ask for a map of your state, and finally, your town. Weather and traffic
situations are overlaid onto a grid of your neighborhood, showing that
construction on the highway will block your usual route to work. The computer
"guide" draws a logical detour.
Next you call your message center, your "virtual community" of friends and
colleagues who have posted news for each other from around the world, and you
check out a video e-mail postcard from your cousin in Hawaii. Finally, you say
goodbye to the screen, which turns back into a kitchen wall.
If you are still commuting to work (instead of telecommuting) and don't have
time for any of this, you grab your portable computer or "personal digital
assistant," a combination of cellular telephone, computer, television, radio,
and fax machine that is no larger than a small paperback book. Plugged in all
night to the multimedia center at your home, this tiny device has been
receiving updated versions of customized news.
On the way to work, you remember to check up on last week's local election
returns in Seattle, where a friend was running for school board. You click a
button, and the cellular phone function automatically calls the Internet. Your
computer guide searches through highlighted words or pictures in last week's
Seattle news stories to bring up the returns; you send an instant consolation
e-mail message that will be waiting for your friend when she wakes up.
Suddenly it hits you: there's another issue that must be raised at the morning
business meeting. You dash off a fax in longhand on the screen of your personal
digital assistant and press a button. Your fax will emerge in clean typescript
from each of your colleagues' printers around the world before everyone gathers
for the 9:00 a.m. teleconference.
Arriving back home after work, you plug the portable communicator back into
your home media center and ask the system to archive Dave Barry's column. You
call up new messages, news, and special advertising information on the screen;
make theater and plane reservations for next week; and order a pizza. You and
your family watch a new custom newscast and catch a favorite movie or
television program. Then you fall asleep watching the baseball game while your
spouse chooses the camera angles and calls up instant replays.
Is this science fiction? Does the world really want this kind of interactive,
multimedia lifestyle? Can middle-class Americans afford it? Will people ever
order customized news and pizza from their television sets?
Certainly, such a high-tech future isn't for everyone. Some of these gadgets
may cost too much, take too much time, or remain too daunting. Skeptics point
out, for example, that the picture phone has been available for years, yet most
consumers have not bought it. VCRs everywhere are still blinking "12:00"
because folks haven't had time to figure out how to set their clocks, and World
Wide Web Internet searches may appeal only to a small, niche
market.
The speed of this change depends heavily on the software designers, who haven't
yet provided the technologically inept customer with a comfortable way to use
the Internet. But this is considered just a matter of time.13
The "Niched" Marketplace
These new technologies are accelerating a shift of power away from traditional
voices of authority in journalism and politics.15 or they are watching the latest courtroom
drama.17 People still want to know what other people are
thinking and still gather for huge consumer, entertainment, and news events,
such as the Super Bowl, the Persian Gulf War, the O.J. Simpson trial, and
Pocohantas.
However, new media designers at the MIT Media Lab and elsewhere predict that
the day-to-day mass audience will splinter further into niches, not just
because hundreds of channels are offering programs where once there were just
three but also because people will want to create their own customized flows of
information.
In politics, citizens already are treated as demographic niches, and our common
values rarely are addressed. Candidates and political interest groups deepen
our divisions by fashioning single-issue appeals to narrow voter populations.
If we are looking for a national sense of citizenship, of shared interests and
goals, we will have even more difficulty finding them in the niched media.
Harvard Prof-essor Robert D. Putnam has documented that Americans' direct
engagement in politics and government has fallen steadily and sharply over the
last generation, even though average levels of education (traditionally the
best predictor of political participation) have risen. Part of the explanation,
Putnam suggests, is that technological trends are radically privatizing or
individualizing how we spend our limited free time.
The fundamental values of both journalism and politics are being challenged, in
part because of the new technologies. Their problems--and their
revitalization--are inextricably linked. The future of both depends on how
effectively they can revive their core standards and regain the public's
trust.
Today, American "news," an artificial construct that has changed constantly
during the past 200 years, is under assault. Unless journalists work now to
save it, the ethic of objectivity that developed in journalism at the turn of
the last century as both a reform effort and a response to market opportunities
may be doomed.23
The idea that these audiences simply have fled to television news is not an
adequate explanation for the drop in newspaper readership. The same poll also
found that only 48 percent of those surveyed had watched network news the night
before, down from 60 percent in 1993. Indeed, the national television networks,
which once enjoyed the attention of a captive nation, now compete with hundreds
of alternative offerings on cable. Now that legal obstacles have been removed,
the telephone companies are replacing their copper wire networks with fiber
optics, enabling them to transmit their own news and classified services
directly into the home.
Ironically, we are losing our gatekeepers just when we need them most. People
are overwhelmed by news products and imitations: infotainment magazine shows,
infomercials, docudramas, home videos, talk shows, and Internet gossip, all
competing with traditional news stories in the old and new media. Citizens need
a trustworthy guide not just for stories about what "officially happened"
around the world each day but for the enormous flow of information that is
gushing into their homes.
The history of earlier media innovations teaches us to take the vision of the
future seriously. All of these newly digitized tools--voice-activated computers
linked to the Internet, "smart" cellular telephones, interactive cable
television, video-on-demand, handwriting-to-text, CD-ROM, and expanded
bandwidth--are in use today, and costs are declining as they improve. One
doesn't want to make the same mistake that William Orton, President of Western
Union, made when he rejected an opportunity to buy Alexander Graham Bell's
patents for $100,000. "What use could this company make of an electrical toy?"
he said.11 
Niche marketing already has arrived, in both commerce and politics. Instead of
offering a single product to the greatest possible number of customers,
marketers now try to sell as many specially tailored products as possible--over
time--to the same loyal customers.19 
