The Internet has changed our lives in ways that we are yet to completely come to terms with. And the pace of technological advancement implies that as soon as we learn the alphabet, the language changes.

It’s altered the way we trade; the way we buy and sell. Created a new marketplace and introduced new efficiencies. There’s been a marked shift in the way we relate to each other, as evidenced through our growing personal-impersonal social network bonds. However, the most fundamental change has been with regard to our relationship with information – our access to it, our consumption of it, the value or credibility we attach to what we consume and the perspectives we draw from it.

As penetration increases, more and more people are switching to the Internet for news. The conventional understanding is that it offers a broad platform with far greater variety than any traditional news medium can. The world, as they say, is just a click away. However, that’s not really how it is.

To draw an analogy, if the World Wide Web has offered us an ocean of information, there have also been attempts at building pipes through which the water can be channeled in a particular direction. The underlying concepts here are relevance and preference. The theory is predicated on the understanding that not all that is out there is of interest to everyone. Each one has their own priorities and tastes and based on that searches are tailored. Customization and personalization is the key.

Now that works wonderfully well when it comes to you planning a holiday or buying a car. But when it comes to news, it’s not quite the same. Let me offer a few examples to make my case.

We have witnessed two phases of personalisation, as such. The preliminary phase was one in which users were asked to engage directly and make choices, i.e. they were given a framework and their feedback was recorded and acted upon.

In India, NDTV was the first major news network to attempt this. Apart from them, a few others such as NewsX also played around with the idea. However, these were rudimentary efforts and required user participation.

In the online arena, you asked users to register and create an account on your website. Thereafter, they were offered the option of designing their own page. You could essentially select the priority of news that you wished to receive when you log on. The stories would be from NDTV’s bank, but you decided how they were prioritised yourself.

On TV, my memory fails me on the exact dates, but in the middle of the last decade a show called My News was added to the evening line-up. The idea was to allow viewers to create their own bulletin. They would have watched the news through the day and could rate stories via text message to set up the priority of the My News bulletin.

In both of these types of attempts in personalisation, the idea was to interact with the consumer and obtain feedback. That was the fundamental goal. It allows for interactivity and builds viewers’ sense of ownership, to gauge interest and responsiveness to stories and work on coverage accordingly.

Both these attempts at customization were rather short-lived and did nothing for the quality of the content or information that we received. It was not only cumbersome for the service provides, but users also didn’t enjoy the idea of maintaining accounts at every platform where they wished to interact. Furthermore, with the arrival of cross-network login facilities, the need for maintaining a site-specific account vanished. For instance, today, I can interact on NDTV.com or Ibnlive.com with my Facebook or Google login. This feeds into the second phase below.

The next phase of personalisation and customisation is the world of algorithms used by companies like Google, Facebook etc. And this became all the more intriguing in December 2009, when Google decided that it was switching on personalised searches for everyone.

In this case, your personal information along with data regarding your online activity is run through complex algorithms to devise preferences, biases, opinions and approaches and the searches are tailored accordingly. This is a 24/7 activity. Everything you do online – even the bits that you believe no one will ever really learn – is often recorded. Something seemingly as inane as what you like on Facebook adds up to your profile. It all feeds into your online fingerprint and you are served accordingly.

Again I stress that while this may be a brilliant model for businesses and to serve advertisers, when it comes to news, it could be potentially disastrous.

In a manner of speaking, customized news to suit your tastes could effectively mean that you cocoon yourself within the comfort of your biases. It can potentially restrict perspective and limit the knowledge arc that you could enjoy. At worst, it can reaffirm notions, which may be insufficient or faulty, allowing them to remain unchallenged and deepen.

News isn’t a commodity where one must get what they want. The very role of news is to create an informed and engaged citizenry, and personalisation as such can prove counterproductive to that. In fact, in many ways, it undermines the principle of free-flow of information that the Internet is hailed for, potentially filtering out exceptions to one’s worldview and promoting ignorance.

Furthermore, two people with differing profiles could potentially obtain very different results for the same search. In this context, it must be kept in mind that on an average, users refer to the top three searches. That, in a sense, casts a massive shadow over the credibility of results. Is it the best, most comprehensive and unbiased report that I am being offered as my top result? Or is it a result that the algorithm believes will best suit my profile?

Lastly, personalization throws into question the role of the gatekeeper. The online world has challenged the traditional role of the journalist as the filter of information. There’s clearly a positive side to it in terms of lending greater voice to public angst and issues of concern. Citizen journalism, blogs and tweets have broken barriers and allowed for a dialogue that was previously unthinkable. There has undoubtedly been democratisation of information flow, or flattening, if you will, of the world.

However, when algorithms begin replacing the traditional human filters or gatekeepers, it is a cause for concern. They are invisible, amoral beasts that can potentially trap one within a bubble of one’s own limitations.

Image Source [http://www.flickr.com/photos/erix/6836785975/sizes/l/in/photostream/]