Coming soon: [Your Name Here] Weekly

Thanks to S. for mentioning this upcoming publicity stunt from Reason magazine. (Also discussed at Slashdot.) It appears that their June issue will feature on the cover a satellite photograph of each subscriber's home address, along with "four cover pages of intensely personalized information, a demonstration of bleeding-edge technology that may one day allow for mass-customized and hyper-individualized print publications."

What a concept! Felix Folio... The Carlos Courier ... The Fiend Files... Pablo Parade... The Trebor Tribune....

I find this interesting not because of the satellite photographs, which after all are readily available to any person or business who knows a mailing address and has access to websites like this, but because the ability to customize the magazine's interior content on a copy-by-copy basis could herald yet more Balkanization of the world of news and views. Already, by selecting only certain news sources to view or read, it's fairly easy to "set ones preferences" to only see news that is congenial to ones' own beliefs, and people from different self-selected "worlds" of information have difficulty communicating with each other even on those rare occasions with they wish to do so. And yet a print-magazine subscriber, or a viewer of broadcast news, cannot quite isolate himself entirely from uncongenial viewpoints because of the "granularity" of the traditional media.

If you get a copy of National Review or browse its website because it supports Bush's policies in the Middle East, you may also get an editorial from William F. Buckley that advocates relaxing marijuana laws, or a blistering denunciation of Bush's proposed immigration reforms (Mark Krikorian, "Amnesty Again". NR, Jan. 28, 2004, pp 28-31). (The latter article, interestingly, is not available on the NR website -- is Mr. Krikorian exercising his intellectual property rights, or does the NR staff wish to keep those Beyond the Pale of its print subscription list from finding and linking to such criticism during an election year?)

By the same token, if you get a copy of The New Republic because it bashes right-wing media types, you may also come across a review that criticizes a "liberal" news source like Al Franken's program on AirAmerica as "boring".

What will the world be like, I wonder, when all information, down to the level of individual articles and editorials, can be filtered, even in printed media, to a flatteringly homogenous blend of agreement with one's demonstrated or assumed beliefs and marketing demographic? Will it become all the more difficult to believe that anyone could sincerely or intelligently disagree with your dearly-held prejudices?

How on earth will libraries deal with this, if every copy of a magazine sent to a subscriber is custom-tailored to that subscriber?

One of the reasons I subscribe to a variety of political magazines is to keep myself honest and at least somewhat informed by actually reading what both right-wingers and left-wingers have to say about themselves, not just what those who think like me say about them on websites that I frequent. I wonder how a marketing department -- or a government agency -- would interpret that pattern of subscriptions and other demographic information? And how will it affect my thinking if all of them start "custom-tailoring" the magazines they deliver to my mailbox in order to match what they think I want to hear? Will I have to start swapping my copy of NR with Trebor's in order to find out what right-wingers are REALLY thinking?