But when University of Pennsylvania media researcher Joseph Turow looks back at Negroponte's vision, he sees another, and more troubling, sort of irony: that without our realizing it, large numbers of small pieces of information about us are being amassed by marketers and data miners, and being used in ways that subtly alter the world we see.
Today, the most obvious effect is in marketing. You may have noticed as you surf the Web how certain ads seem to follow you from site to site while you never stop to wonder how they got there.
For that matter, "targeted marketing" may be fine with you - it generally doesn't bother me. You may even have clicked "yes" to say you'd welcome ads that seem "more relevant" to your life.
But Turow doesn't see targeted marketing as entirely innocuous, and is especially concerned as its cousin, behavioral profiling, seeps out of the commercial realm. Already, he sees it affecting politics, where free and open exchanges are crucial to democracy, and coloring presentation of news and information by websites more focused on maximizing revenue than on journalistic impact.
Turow lays out his case for concern in The Daily You, published this month by Yale University Press - its name an unsubtle twist on Negroponte's sunnier vision of how data about people's interests and preferences can be used to their advantage.
But Turow's argument itself is a subtle one: He doesn't say personal profiles should never be used, and he recognizes that marketers have used similar data offline for decades. Mostly, he warns about the consequences if it's used without people's knowledge or understanding - something his book goes a long way toward advancing.
Helping politicians spin
