His first chapter is called "The Daily Me," and deals with ever increasing ability of the new communication technologies to allow their users to personalize what they receive, tailor what comes to them so that they only hear and see what they want to hear and see.
Steve, we may have already passed the Rubicon. I have come to know over 100 college undergraduates quite well. I see them daily, share many-a-meal, and even have some say in important aspects of their lives. I'm reasonably sure they like me a lot, and might even respect me just because of my limited amounts of gray hair.
But could I interest even one in blogging? Or for that matter the beauties of education by distance means? Or the NY Times on line? Or that their employers will expect them to communicate well, which means lots of reading and writing,all within an intelligently framed context.
Nope. Not one bit. They just look at me as some cave man from the Ice Age.
At lunch they gather around the boob tube, glued to comics, sports or a really and truly dumb movie. Most dinners, about the same. What news they get is carefully filtered to their political and athletic leanings - Bush supporters swear by Fox, leftists are inclined to MSNBC. Pro sports or collegiate, don't bother me with the other if I have no interest outside of Eugene and the Ducks.
Not one takes a daily newspaper, few read the articles I send them carefully pruned about matters I *thought* would be interesting to them. Yawn. Yawn.
Perhaps the worst of this is they hold tight to whatever opinions they have formed, easily comfortable with the notion that "my opinion counts just as much as yours."
Perhaps this all has little to do with the digital divide? Or should we be expanding our own definition of The Divide? And, in closing, I love RSS.
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