Custom-Tailored Online News
Can Be Dangerous for Society

By TOM WEBER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

THINK BACK to before Sept. 11, and be honest. How much attention did you give to Afghanistan? What did you know about the Taliban, or the Northern Alliance? How closely did you follow topics like politics in the Middle East, airline safety or the threat of bioterrorism?

Now, of course, all of those subjects are of great interest. But before last month's devastating attacks, they represented a handful of issues among many others. Whether you paid much attention to any or all of them probably depended on your individual interests. Some people are foreign-affairs junkies. Others gobble up science news, including tidbits about biological weapons.

That's the nature of individuality. But crossing that phenomenon with the interactive technology used on many Web sites may lead to trouble. Cass Sunstein, a law professor and First Amendment expert at the University of Chicago, wrote eloquently about this problem earlier this year in a book titled "Republic.com." It's a work with new relevance in this changed world.

In the book, Prof. Sunstein warns of something he dubs "The Daily Me." It's evocative shorthand for the personalization and customization that have become a routine part of life on the Web, as sites encourage visitors to filter news and information according to their preferences.

BUT IF PEOPLE wind up seeing only what they want, they won't be exposed to ideas outside their preconceived areas of interest. To Prof. Sunstein, that's a troubling development for democracy. Ensuring that citizens are exposed to a variety of views helps guard against fragmentation and extremism. And, he argues, discouraging citizens from paying attention only to narrow interests nurtures common experiences, a shared context that strengthens a sense of society.

Recent events have merely underscored this. In the attacks of Sept. 11, the world has tragic proof of what can happen when extremist views are reinforced without any checks, Prof. Sunstein says. Osama bin Laden, he says, seems to have been careful to recruit a core group of people who shun any ideas that don't conform to their extremist interpretations of Islam.

"It's hard to imagine people would become terrorists if they were exposing themselves to different points of view," Prof. Sunstein says.

Yet everywhere these days we are confronted with opportunities to filter and customize the information we see. One of Yahoo's most useful services is its My Yahoo home page. With a free account, users can set up a customized page that shows news in categories they've selected, weather for the cities they've chosen and stock quotes for the companies they want to monitor.

When setting up the "Headlines" section of a My Yahoo page, users can select from a menu that includes such choices as "World News from Reuters" or "Politics from AP." Or they can skip all of those and build their news page around "Video Game News" or "Auto Racing." Once a customized page has been set up, people see only what they asked to see.

Similar technologies are all over the place. Quickbrowse.com (http://www.quickbrowse.com/) will grab Web pages you pick from different sites, then combine them into one for easy viewing. A company called Octopus gathers and combines Web information with data from internal corporate systems to give business users a one-stop knowledge portal.

It isn't just the Internet. The phenomenon exists everywhere technology increases the number of information sources. Television has evolved from a few broadcast networks to 500 channels, many of them super-specialized to cater to interests like food or cartoons. So-called personal video recorders such as TiVo grab and store only the programming we want, creating the equivalent of customized television channels.

ALL OF THIS is a natural consequence of some very beneficial developments.

Filtering is a response to information overload. And information overload is the result of the ways in which technology has opened up vast new frontiers of knowledge to individuals. From the computer screen in your study, it's possible to sample views from all over the world.

To those who have been following recent events online, that ability has been a boon. Web users can read the latest dispatches from this newspaper online -- then surf to news outlets in Europe, the Middle East and everywhere else in the world. Web sites have been home to vigorous discourse, too, with opinions both expressed and challenged.

So how do we guard against technology's potential to fragment and isolate? Prof. Sunstein has a variety of suggestions, including the encouragement of Web sites that foster open, reasonable debate, and economic subsidies for public Internet programming. He also makes an argument for mass media.

Readers may skip over the international pages of a newspaper or change the channel when a report about politics comes on, but it's better than never having been exposed to the material in the first place.

There is also value in simply recognizing the problem, and understanding the benefits that come from addressing it. "People from different walks of life see each other as subject to shared risks in a way that didn't exist before Sept. 11," Prof. Sunstein says. "You see people treating each other as fellow citizens."