ABSTRACT
In his 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte described a world in which everyone had a virtual newspaper entirely tailored to his or her personal taste. Negroponte proposed creating an intelligent, computerized “interface agent” that would “read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized summary”:
It would mix headline news with “less important” stories relating to acquaintances, people you will see tomorrow, and places you are about to go or have just come from. It would report on companies you know. In fact, under these conditions, you might be willing to pay the Boston Globe a lot more for ten pages than a hundred pages, if you could be confident that it was delivering you the right subset of information. You would consume every bit (so to speak). Call it The Daily Me. (p. 153)
